Victorianitas

I love my new job to pieces, but there's a lot to get used to.

First: The keys. I have office keys which must not be lost on pain of death (or on pain of someone in Estates & Buildings rolling their eyes at me, I'm not quite sure how they do things round here). I'm used to punch-codes. A minor thing, you might think, but you haven't had to lock up this place; I've been leaving at half-past five most evenings, when most people are gone already, and honestly I think there are fewer locks on the White House.

Second: The money. I don't have to worry about it any more.

Third: The move from a small, neatly-enclosed university outside a middling-sized town to a huge, sprawling university campus in a huge, sprawling city. This one is old enough to have towers and turrets and hundreds of years of traditions building up like layers of sediment on the buildings. What do you mean, your office is over there? There's a bloody great road here! That's still campus?

Fourth: The being treated like an adult who actually works there. Not that I didn't work at the last place (in multiple posts, actually, and, ha, you should have been there for the confusion and commotion when I had to fill in 'Job Title' on a single form for handing in my notice), but - okay, think of it like this. My last place, there was an office set aside for those of us PhDs who did hourly-paid teaching (US readers, 'adjuncts'; my department called us 'postdocs', but fuck off, department, postdocs get salaries). There were more desks than there were people. Nevertheless, one of the secretaries threw an absolute fit over the idea that we actually left stuff on our desks ('Those are hot-desks!' 'Yes, but they're hot-desks for us, so we didn't -' 'They're hot-desks!' 'YOU DON'T EVEN GIVE US SHELVES'). First day of the new job? 'This one's your desk, and oh, please rearrange any of the furniture you like! Make yourself at home!'

Fifth: The job itself. But I'm handling that. I think.