Presidential Visit

So just what is the correct turn of phrase to introduce your ex-girlfriend to your wife (who is also on the order of 20 years her junior)? This is just one of many thoughts to cross my mind while attending a dinner tonight hosted by the President of our University in his home.

I mean, how do you turn down an invitation from the President - your boss' boss' boss?

It was a nice evening. The President's Residence is a very nice house in Squirrel Hill, formerly owned by among other people the chairman of Alcoa. Many of us spent a good deal of time trying to figure out what the metric was that had been used to select the attendees. Aside from my ex there wasn't a single person in attendance I knew - although there were one or two I recognized. Some time into the event the scuttlebutt was that it was a gathering of non-tenured, tenure track faculty who had been at the school since at least 2002. Really I think we would have come up with something better had we been made to guess.

Mrs. TANBI and I did meet a nice couple from Architecture, specifically Architecture Historians. They proffered the thought that the time loved story that Baker Hall's corridors are sloped so that if the venture failed as a school the building could be easily turned over into a factory is apocryphal. (ed note: I just spelled that "apocraphal" which although wrong I believe conveys a more vivid impression as not only false, but also a load of crap.) Since this is something that is like line one of the tour that every prospective student gets, Mrs TANBI and I were suitably shocked. The problem with the debunking is that the true reason for the sloped corridors wasn't part of the effort. We theorized that perhaps Andrew had one leg longer than the other and the hallways were configured such that when facing sideways he naturally stood upright. Its as good a reason as any I suppose.

Visits like this strike me as something that in the best case you make no impression at all. You don't want to be the one to spill red wine on the antique couch or some such thing. We spoke to the President and his wife two times each. All in all I think we did very well, although I am not certain it was in my best interest to declare that I knew for a fact that you could not use the University Procurement Credit Card in a Las Vegas casino. I mean, the statement was on topic and made sense, but perhaps I hadn't used the best sense making it (but really, you can't use a TT card in an out of town hotel). This is perhaps the sort of thing your boss' boss' boss might hope you really don't know.

Still, I wore a tie. Maybe that will count for something.