Sheryl is a spry, near-retirement gal with bottle-blonde hair who has taught English, math, and computer classes for the college for fifteen years. She has a memory like a video camera, capturing everything—events, conversations, reactions—in a linear fashion, frame by frame. (My brain, in contrast, uses a snapshot approach, organizing scenes more or less by strength of emotion rather than chronological order. So, basically my memory is a photo album organized by a three-year-old.)
The future has been looking somewhat precarious at the career college. Rumors abound. We're moving, we're closing, we're fired... so I was quite interested when Sheryl told me she cornered the President of the college in the underground parking lot for some answers. I wasn't there, but I can picture him pinned against a car by her direct, no-nonsense, schoolteacher manner.“Tell me the truth now. Are we closing?”
She's quite intimidating when she assumes her full school-mistress persona, complete with lowered brows, pointing index finger, and strident voice. I can only imagine he was transported back to childhood, cowering under the shadow of his first-grade teacher as she demanded he stop biting the buttons on his shirt. No, wait, that was my childhood. Well, he probably ate crayons. (I never did that.)
Apparently he realized he wasn't getting away without coughing up some answers. She said he sounded like he was eager, almost relieved, to tell her his plans for the college. His plans. That phrase surprised me. I don't know why I thought someone else was driving the bus off the cliff. Maybe because we rarely see him, our invisible college president. I guess I thought he was traveling to conferences, hobnobbing with career college academic-wannabes, doing team-building exercises while his team languishes back at our wilting campuses. What do I know. This is what happens in the absence of leadership: people make up stories to explain what they see and hear. I'm very creative, as you know. But being a chronic malcontent, my stories tend toward the sturm und drang.
Anyway, back to the story. The answer to the question was “Yes.”
Yes, the site is closing. By the end of 2013, when the lease on the decrepit moldy office building runs out, we will have transitioned to a new site, currently under negotiations, somewhere near the airport (and our major competitors). So, we aren't actually moving; the site will be closing while a new site is opening.
I don't need a Magic 8 Ball to see the future now. Sheryl and I and a handful of other long-timers will man the sinking ship at the old place, while shiny new adjuncts and keepers from the other campuses launch the new venture. While we nurse along the old computers, patch together wobbly chairs, and erase the ghosts of 20 years' worth of scribblings on tired whiteboards, they will enjoy new desks, new chairs, new computers, new whiteboards, maybe even a few Smartboards. While we alternately sweat and freeze in the microclimates of our familiar worn-out classrooms, they will have thermostats in every classroom that actually control the climate for that room.
And when we finally usher out the last student, wipe down the whiteboards for the last time, pack up our mementos, and close the doors on the old site, what then? Do you think there will be room at the new site for us?
We'll be lucky if they remember who we are.
