In a slightly ironic reflection of real world happenings, the Finance department is buying out our office. I didn’t even know you could do inter-departmental forced relocations in what is supposedly an institute of learning, but, as my boss explained to me, they have the money and we don’t. So we’ve got to get to stepping, by May at the latest.

The moving part itself probably won’t be so bad. We will hire burly people to move our boxes and metric tons of computer equipment that, while very high tech and fancy, serve no apparent function for our studies (under Jodie’s reign, the budget was spent many a useless trinket). We’re staying in the same building, as opposed to moving across campus, another plus. In fact, we’re moving just two floors down…to the current home of the entomology museum.

If you’ve ever had occasion to visit an entomology museum, or any other place where bugs are housed and preserved, your nose would have instinctively wrinkled upon scanning that last sentence. For those of you who have never experienced that dubious pleasure, think back to your grandmother’s house and the varying smells that permeate the air: musty curtains, thrift store furniture, weird balms and powders marketed strictly to the elderly. Upon opening a dresser drawer or closet, you unleash a pungent, acrid odor that overwhelms the rest - the peculiar, repulsive funk of mothballs. Now imagine that funk amplified three-thousand fold, and you’ve got the experience of standing in one of the basement floors of my building.

You can even smell it up here, on the fourth floor. It’s faint, but still enough so that at the end of the day, a ghostly whiff of napthalene clings to your clothing. Not enough for people to shrink away from you visibly, but enough to haunt your dreams at night with images of dead, pinned bugs, staring at you with unblinking compound eyes.

Down on the first floor is the worst. I think that’s where they store the napthalene. Anytime I have to use the first floor entrance, I make a run for it - I’ve never done stairs so fast in my life as I have when I’ve had to pass through that area. There’s a big lecture hall down there, but a lot of professors refuse to teach there because they get migraines from the smell. If they speak up early, they can get room change requests. There’s also a vending machine, which is restocked maybe once every three months. I’ve never seen it empty.

The bug museum people swear up and down that once they move out of there, once they stop using the napthalene, the smell will dissipate. For further precautions, they will replace the ceiling tiles and paint the walls. I’m still a little worried that it will then smell like painty napthalene, but whatever. We’re hoping to finagle some air purifiers also - if not them, then from those jerks in Econ that are forcing us to move. Jerks.

Last week we went to inspect our new digs on the second floor. Smell-wise, it wasn’t as bad as I’d expected - I guess the smell just sinks to the first floor to irritate the people in the design studios down below. See a pattern in how KU ranks its departments? Engineering and business get shiny new buildings, Geometrical Anthropology is moved to a polluted office space, and the design people get to hang out with the cockroaches downstairs, the ones that somehow manage to persist despite all the bug-killing napthalene in the air. Maybe napthalene is just for preservation, not for killing; in which case, there may be super-cockroaches running around in the basement. Ugh.

In appearance, the bug museum looks like a dungeon. A dungeon full of dead bugs and papers and pizza boxes (?). It is cordoned off from the rest of the hallway by two big fire doors; the inner hallway within is dimly lit with failing fluorescent tubes. Huge industrial lockers line one wall, while on the opposite side hang paintings of what we supposed were famous entomologists. They rather resembled bugs themselves, with beady eyes, tiny pursed mouths and huge glasses.

There are drinking fountains in our little inner hallway, as well as a little kitchen sink in one of the bug rooms. Now, I know that the entire building utilizes the same plumbing and pipes for water, and that the drinking fountain up here probably spouts exactly the same water as the one by the bug museum. I’m not sure, however, that I can make myself drink water that, to me, looks like it is being piped from the napthalene storage area. Not to mention all the dead bugs (which, hopefully, will be moved. I do not want them to leave anything behind).

Belle has an idea: before we leave, after we have moved all our stuff and before we hand over our keys to those fancy-pants economics people, we will stuff mothballs in the ceiling tiles and on top of the shelves. Take that, jerks.

An aside: the econ people came here, to scope out our place, and they apparently said that they do not like the paint. Our walls are painted “eggshell” white. That would be the standard “eggshell white” used in almost every public place because it is the color least offensive to people’s sensibilities. I do not know what they plan on changing it to, but hopefully it’s the same barf-colored shade of pink as the rest of the walls in the building.

Edit: Not a few minutes after posting this did a weird cockroach-like bug divebomb me as I was typing and land on my hand. I think it had a yellow stripe on it, but I was too busy smashing at it with a tissue to get a better look. It took several tries before I finally bested it with the power of Kleenex(tm). My super-roach theory may be correct. I am now going to spend the rest of my time at work perched atop my swivel chair with a rolled-up newspaper at the ready.