new hire orientation

Why did we need to see a slideshow of buildings on all three campuses? Ooh, and here's people in the dental school cleaning teeth! Why do I need to see that? Why did the HR person feel the need to inform us, in tones of shock and horror, that whitehouse.com is a *porn* site? Oooooooh, pooooooorn. Everybody made wide-eyed faces and shook their heads. Am I the only new hire who likes porn? Am I the only new hire who is ready to bang her head on the table listening to all this useless information that we could LOOK UP FOR OURSELVES in the fucking 60-page handbook, or one of the three or four auxiliary handbooks including the one called @WORK about the Five Tufts Competencies (summary: do a good job at your job)? For godsakes, I could be checking two-hybrid plates! ::Beats head on table::

It's impossible to really think with the perky droning of HR going on, so when I do manage to try to get my mind elsewhere it's all coming out as bad free verse. As in:

When Harry finally gets around to telling them about Voldemort,
his red eyes and high-pitched voice,
Hermione has them over during the hols and shows them Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
After that Harry is never so scared again, at least not
of the way he looks.
And Hermione
thinks for the first time of a universal solvent for magic
and since that's all that's holding Voldemort together
when Harry pulls out the super soaker from under his cloak
and blasts him
he falls apart into a sodden lump of bone and flesh
soaked in Harry's blood.
She never admits to Snape where she got the idea.

Only Ron takes away nothing, too entranced by the dancing pictures
to follow the plot.

more from the department of boredom and bad free verse

Nothing gets thrown out at Hogwarts. The house-elves squeeze the pumpkin juice
fresh every day;
the pulp and rinds
are dried and pressed into bricks to shore up the crumbling foundation
or fed to Hagrid's beasts. Pumpkin seeds sometimes sprout in the manure,
or vines grow up from the basement
crumbling the walls further.

"Some day," Professor Sprout thinks, "The vines will win and Hogwarts
will belong to the plants again."

She doesn't know
whether she'd be glad or not.c

spamming my journal with Really Bad Poetry

Because of the sniper in Maryland, my
children were afraid to go to school.
"It's just like in Harry Potter," I
told them, "Before Voldemort fell.
People were afraid but they kept on
with their daily lives. We can, too."

I don't think this is actually true, that James
kissed Harry and was in at the bank on time
(or the Ministry or whatever).
I picture them cooped up in the Welsh cottage
snapping at each other,
the diaper bin in the corner taking over the room
with its overflow, and Lily too afraid her wand would be detected
to cast an odor-dispelling charm.

"Voldemort killed Harry's parents," my
children point out, and cling to me even harder.
So maybe it was a bad comparison;
we don't even live in Maryland, and also
there's no magical baby whose forehead
will reflect a bullet.a

doesn't that just figure

After boring, pointless morning, rushed through benefits plan stuff in afternoon. I guess some new hires probably already know all about 403(b)s and really needed to know that quality will be the pole star that guides us.

Afternoon session bad poetry:

( Flick and Swish )

( Badge of Courage )

( Draco in January )