The building where my office is is one of those 60's era brick buildings with lots of basically identical little offices arranged along indistinguishable hallways. Tenured professors are known to get lost in there trying to find specific offices. To make it a little easier, some of us decorate our doors:
The key identifying the numbered items is below the fold, but as this is a fairly general phenomenon in academia, I thought I'd try making this a Bonus Photo Edition Dorky Poll:
What's on your office door?
(If you don't have your own office, then what's decorating your workspace? If you're not the type to add any individuality to the space where you work, well, what are you doing reading blogs? Shouldn't you be working?)
Leave a short description or a link to a picture in the comments. (If you leave a link, there's a chance that your comment will get held for moderation, which may be a longer delay than usual, as I'm going to be busy today, and not in my office to clear comments. I'll get to it as soon as I can, though.)
The stuff on my door:
- "Fear the Turtle" sign. It's a Maryland thing, you wouldn't understand.
- Ally sign. This is a sign indicating that I attended a LGBT Ally training session a little while back. It basically amounts to a pledge that I won't be a dick to any lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered students who come to my office with problems related to their sexuality.
- My name in katakana. It was part of the bilingual name signs they gave out at Worldcon, and I like the way it looks.
- Tickets from the 2003 East Regional Finals in Albany. The two games that Syracuse won to get to the Final Four, the year they won the title.
- Fortune cookie fortune. It says "All of your hard work will soon pay off." I got it about a month before my tenure process started, and it seemed like a good omen.
- Calvin and Hobbes cartoons. Four of them, clustered around the name plate. It's one of the two best syndicated comic strips ever.
- Picture of Emmy. How could I not display a picture of the Queen of Niskayuna?
- Directions to my lab. If I'm not in my office, that's the next place to look for me.
- xkcd comic. It's the one about complex exponentials.
- Article about the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics. I don't update this stuff all that often...
- Ph.D. comic. The one about "Desk Entropy."
- Dilbert comic. "How about a nanotechnology stem cell for fighting terrorists?"
- Sluggy Freelance comics. Kiki poinging around Riff's lab.
- ESPN Page 2 printout. It's the bit of this article about the Ph.D. defense, which is one of the best descriptions of the defense process I've ever read.
I'm sure that the psychologists whose lab is just down the hall could have a field day analyzing what this says about me, but it amuses me.
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I just moved. The only thing on my new door is a large vintage "Pigs in Space" poster. It's getting a little tattered.
I share an office, so there's nothing but my name and my officemate's name on the door. Inside, taped to the side of one of my bookshelves, there's a copy of the Far Side cartoon captioned "It's time we face reality, my friends... We're not exactly rocket scientists." (Actually, we are, though we have had the occasional first stage motor anomaly.) There is also a sticker from one of the missions I have worked on and a "Practice Random Acts of Kindness and Senseless Beauty" sticker on the side of my other bookshelf.
The only personal thing I have on my door is a fortune cookie fortune that says "The only normal people you know are the ones you don't know well." I've personalized the my office (started with bare white walls) with lots of pictures (almost all cut from old calendars) and some geologic maps and cross-sections (mostly for areas I'm actually doing work in). I don't have my camera with me today or I'd take some pictures. Our halls are "decorated" with posters, maps, cross-sections, outcrop descriptions... This is a huge step up from a few State Geologists ago who wouldn't let anything be put up in the halls and no thumbtacks in the offices.
I don't have an office, but the area around the desk in my dorm room is pretty well postered (crappy pics: large view, small view).
Lots of xkcd. The ticket and the playbill cover from when I saw Wicked. The high school calendar page where my karate class was featured. Periodic table. Dragon banner. MIT admit poster. Also, since those pics were taken, I've added a sagittal MRI of my head that I got as a thank-you for being an experimental subject.
Now, if I didn't live in a dorm that prohibited painting on the walls...
http://www.emedco.com/prodGroupAT.asp?dept_id=3557
Initally preceived as a jest, then not.
Mostly cartoons of my own creation ( http://home.netcom.com/~swansont/ ) -- I cover up the little window with them -- and a Dilbert or two.
I have absolutely nothing on my door, granted I just moved into this office a few months ago, so give me time ...
Last april fools I was in my fourth year of undergrad, and was handing in an assignment in one night. It was on a weekend, a sunday, so I had to get a key from security to unlock the science building.
In any case, when I was up there I realized that the name pieces on 3 profs doors could be slid out. Inspired, I spent the next 45 minutes juggling the contents of these three profs doors around. I was meticulous, everything was in the exact same position on a different door, I moved posters which were up outside the doors (3 in total), and lastly, the nametags.
The next day, I came in, not telling them that I did it (they still don't know who did it, in fact they blamed someone else ...), to gauge their reactions.
One grad student thought that all the profs switched offices (smart one, him) and two of the profs themselves were standing around shaking their heads as though someone had kicked a puppy muttering "who would do this? I don't understand".
The third prof (who has a great sense of humour) was regrettably away at a conference, upon finding out asked why the culprit made it so easy to switch the doors back (and didn't use superglue instead of the original tape).
In my cubicle I have two Far Side cartoons: the one with Satan leading a maestro into a room full of banjo players, and the one with a mountaineer climbing a peak holding a flag while two tobogganers play on the other side, having obviously climbed to the summit many times. Also, a bunch of photos and postcards.
http://mollishka.blogspot.com/2007/03/i-should-charge-photon-tax.html
I have just one thing on my door: a piece of art a friend did, depicting a small blue creature in a lab coat with an enormous toothy grin and a syringe, surrounded by B-movie lab paraphernalia. I'd post a photo, but my camera is at home.
My Door is a Window to My Soul.
at ibiblio, we cover more than one door. It's a shared office with desks for (currently) nine grad students, an undergrad, a faculty member, and two staff. Collectively we never sleep.
What's on my office door?
A quote from Wodehouse, a quote from Waugh, and
"Life Without Mozart"
I've got nothing exciting (I'm an adjunct sharing with a partially-retired professor so it's just not worth it) but my husband has a magnetic marble run on his door. The students are upset when he's there and the door is open.
Which xkcd is on complex exponentials?
Nothing of consequence on the door. Inside there are framed pictures, all sorts of detritus (cartoons and the like on a bulletin board) as you might guess from that photo I linked, and one item so unique that I can't describe it.
A random collection of PhD and Dilbert comics. I try to change them out regularly but some are pretty stale....
I'm academic staff (sysadmin responsible for assorted web systems and the Horror Known Only As Blackboard) and I keep my door pretty spare, but I've added Goeff Chaucer's "Theme from Shaft" and the "bobcat" strip of xkcd.
I believe those summarize my institutional role pretty nicely. :)
PS: At some point I have to add Bob the Angry Flower's screed on the proper use of the apostrophe to the door. Just because I'm in IT doesn't mean I can't try to uphold some basic standards of literacy.
Thank you so much. . .I've been trying to remember the name of "that comic I used to read with a murderous gerbil" for months now.
I keep my desk and office perfectly clear of personalization just to shock the people who know me. The first time people walk into it they consistently comment on how it is "so not you."
A copy of A is for Alanine, since we are in the protein business here.
http://www.photoposting.net/pic.aspx/IDp~674
Because we have a brand new building, the main donors still care about the appearance. Thus we aren't allowed to put things on our doors yet, beyond sign-up sheets or schedules. I'm told this will be relaxed in about a year.
I have a sticker with a foamy mug and the slogan, "Beer Makes You Schmart".