Working Vacations

TigerBlog saw something that he's not sure he's ever seen on a Sunday before.

It was a mail truck, delivering mail.

TB isn't sure what was going on. It was Sunday in the late morning, and there was a mail truck in front of him.

The truck kept stopping at each mailbox at the end of each driveway. At first, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

Everyone has been in this situation before. The truck is just far enough out into the middle of road that you're not really sure if you should pass it or not.

So yeah, that's what TB's first thought was. Then he remembered it was Sunday.

Did they start delivering mail on Sundays?

The mailroom in Jadwin Gym has spent the last 45 years in the same spot, TB presumes. He can vouch for the last 26 years at least.

It's been on the balcony, in the room all the way on the end closest to the Director of Athletics' office, as opposed to the football office side. In other words, it's been next to TigerBlog's office.

TigerBlog can't count the number of times through the years that someone has wandered down the hall, head down, reading something on a piece of paper or eventually on a phone and walked into TB's office instead of the mail room. Then they look up, mutter something and then walk into the door next door.

The best of those ever was when Louise Gengler, the longtime women's tennis coach, walked into TB's office and said "what did I want to talk to you about? Oh wait. I'm going to the mail room. That's right."

If you know Louise, then you get it.

The mail room has been relocated to B level, across from the sprint football office. The copy machine is down there as well.

The room that used to be the mail room is now an office, where Mike Henderson, the track and field operations director, and Chessie Jackson of the women's basketball staff sit.

Henderson used to sit in the Office of Athletic Communications. The OAC consists of three offices that are connected on the inside, unlike the rest of the offices on the Jadwin balcony.

Now that Henderson was moved to the old mail room, Andrew Borders has moved back upstairs from the OAC satellite location, hidden off of C level.

Borders shares his office with Kristy McNeil. In the next office, Craig Sachson shares the space with Ben Badua. TigerBlog is in the next office, alone.

That actually was the operative word last week. Alone. The other four were all on vacation, and TB had the OAC all to himself.

Ah, but just because they were on vacation doesn't mean that their workload stopped. And it doesn't mean that they put things on hold.

Nope.

All four of them were posting stories during vacation. TigerBlog lost count of how many stories they put, partly because Andrew was updating the Hans Brase/Spencer Weisz story of international basketball pretty much a few times a day.

Andrew actually went above on beyond. His travels took him to Las Vegas, where he did a video with T.J. Bray, who was playing in the NBA summer league there.

Oh and while he was there? He also did a video with Matt Bowman of the baseball team, who is now playing for the Mets' Triple-A team in Las Vegas.

All four of them updated the website. And sent out a bunch of tweets. All while on vacation.

Why? Two reasons.

First, it's the nature of the business. The news goes on all year round, even when people happen to be on vacation. And these days, college athletics is its own 24-hour news cycle.

More than that, though, it's the nature of the people who work here.

They understand that they are on call, as it were. And they don't let a little thing like vacation get in the way of that.

Hey, TigerBlog always blogs on his vacations.

And his OAC colleagues are just as reliable.

Nobody told Andrew he had to do those videos. It's just how he is.

It's just how they all are.