Rituals of the Past

I opened my e-mail account this morning to find the following e-mail from an old friend....

Greetings Recovering Housing Friends!

Waking up today was not stressful. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t until the news anchor noted the date that I realized it was even August 1st.

Everyone remembers the significance of August 1st RIGHT (or you wouldn’t be getting this email)…training started.

Yes, days and days of policy review, opening of school information, team building exercises, copying lots of stuff, finalizing late RA hires, eating lunch at the Schwebel Room, planning for the RAs to arrive and 1000 other things!

So, nine years after my last August 1st training day started, I can finally enjoy the day. Why? Because I’m NOT going to TRAINING!

Now, this doesn’t mean I didn’t like training, after all I was assigned nine of those years to coordinate some part of training (RA, RD, KIC and GA).

Yes, we still remember it, vividly all these years later. I worked as a Resident Director for 7 years. Seven years of safety and diversity and communication training for two weeks followed by another couple of weeks of passing it on to my own staff. Team building, did she mention the team building exercises? It had fun moments but in some ways it made you long for the craziness of the school year so you could wake up from the training haze. Every night after the numbing training sessions there were rooms to inspect and forms to fill out--ah, those were the days. The good news was 2 months off, or at least 2 months doing something slightly different and enjoying the summer slow down on the campus.

Sometimes I miss those days--mostly those school schedule induced breaks that don't happen in the corporate world. One day someone at work remarked about how calm I was in a crisis. I looked him in the eye and told him I didn't have to worry about keying into a room and finding a dead kid, no drunks threw up on me and the police never called at 4AM so as crisis went this was really nothing.