All Your Desk Are Belong To Us

For the last several weeks, at 8:40-ish am on Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays, I’ve used the back stairs of Carver Hall at Iowa State to my office on the third floor. Just inside the landing, behind the doors, I fill up my water bottle at the water fountain before going to my office room to prepare to teach back-to-back-to-back public speaking classes.

For some reason, some of the English Department and all of Communication Studies shares the building with the Math Department. It’s quite a mix of words and numbers. I don’t know the math teachers, but I know some of the adjuncts in English and Comm. One teacher I know is Jay. Jay always says, “Hi” and we let each other know when coffee is freshly made in the break room.

Outside of Jay’s office is this desk. It’s been there probably since summer. At the beginning of fall, I noticed that the desk had a note stating it would be moved. (Sometimes people swap out desks and chairs in the hallways. It could be easy to just wear jeans, a T-shirt, and a back-brace and pick up all the hallway furniture to unload at a pawn shop.) The note was circled.

Underneath the note for the move, someone wrote the next line: “Resistance is futile.” Every morning at 8:40ish am, I’d laugh after reading that. Then, I noticed just after midterms another line underneath: “You will be assimilated.”

Parallel to English and Comm Studies, the Women’s & Genders Studies as well as the American Indian Studies have offices on the same floor of our building. I’ve been thinking, Are these notes just some cheeky undergrad? or Are these notes some sort of cultural critique? I’m not sure, but I knew I had to share what I found.