Faculty Retreats

Glimpse #20

What do you call a gathering of very drunk, mostly socially inept PhDs behaving like it’s their first undergraduate spring break trip to Daytona Beach or Cabo? Yes, you’re correct, it’s the annual faculty retreat. Oh, fuck I hate these events! It is the same thing every year. Two to three days of sitting around all day at wobbly conference tables discussing things that’ll never get implemented because the administration has the final say.  Then it’s amateur night. Binge drinking by folks who can’t handle their liquor and doing things they wouldn’t have contemplated sober back at campus. Nine months later and you’ll have at least one faculty out on maternity leave and another facing a paternity lawsuit. Maybe administration should have the final say in things. Would you trust a business decision to people who act like teenagers?

I stopped going to the retreats years ago. I figured I was saving the university money by not attending and through multiple years of practice I can get shit faced drunk in the comfort of my own home. You’re welcome. For about a week or two after any retreat, I would get comments from my colleagues like “didn’t see you the retreat this year”. No shit Sherlock, you didn’t see me there for the last five. I remember the first faculty retreat I went to at Shithole College in Kansas. After a morning breakfast of stale supermarket croissants from the local IGA and instant coffee (they go all out at these events), the first day started with an icebreaker so that everyone would feel comfortable talking with everyone else at their table. Doesn’t anyone realize these are people who talk for a living? You get them started and they’ll never shut the fuck up. You were supposed to quickly state your name, the department you’re in, and what is your favorite color. The morning icebreaker lasted until 1:30 pm. There was some guy who teaches oil painting and his two-hour diatribe on color being influenced by the time of day, the seasons, your own mood, the subject matter, and obviously whether you were color blind or not, was root canal-like excruciating. Although his explanation of the color cyan being a bluish green produced at the visible wavelength of between 490mand 520m nanometers at roughly a frequency of 600 terahertz was fascinating in its total nerdiness. It has been my favorite color ever since. Thankfully, we ran out of time before it was my turn.

After a lunch of lukewarm shit on a shingle and even warmer Coke, we sat around the rest of the day talking about how to increase morale among faculty. I know! I know! Pick me! Pick me! Stop having retreats and move our god damn college out of God forsaken Kansas! Hell, even Nebraska is better than here and Iowa kicks butt in comparison. But I kept my mouth shut, for once, and listened to my colleagues’ genuinely thoughtful ideas that had no actual bearing on reality. It reminded me of student government back in high school.  Maybe if we can just get a jukebox for the cafeteria and can have pizza on Fridays everything will be great. By the end of day two, my brain had drizzled out of my left ear, and I was nearly comatose. I promised myself I would find a way never to go to one of these things again.

I mostly kept my promise. The last retreat I went to, I organized. It was during my time at the not-to-be-disclosed university in Florida and it was just a retreat for the College of Arts & Sciences. The four colleges of the university competed against each other to see which one could throw the best retreat in terms of audacity and opulence. For this reason, they never did full university retreats. The beer drinking contests between colleges alone would have been dangerous.  Mine was meant to be the retreat to end all retreats. In that regard it was an overwhelming success. Money was no problem mainly because it wasn’t mine, it was from a slush fund the dean of our college set up that the university didn’t know about. The books were cooked all over this campus. Instead of the usual Holiday Inn along the interstate experience for lodging, I booked us at the Happy Dolphin Resort right on St. Pete Beach: open your hotel door and step your bare foot right onto the softest sandy beach anywhere. Much better than stepping out and seeing the Hooter’s next to the 275 Expressway like the previous year’s retreat. The dean was a big scotch drinker so the first day I drove up the Devil’s Elbow area of town where all the fancy swanky yachts are docked and found a nice bottle of Dewar’s Double Double 32 Year Old scotch at an upscale liquor store. The purveyor said it was the smoothest scotch in the world. I had the hotel clerk place the bottle in the dean’s hotel room.  The was the start of what would be later termed The Great Decline as the university’s CFO renamed the last retreat ever to happen at that university and the subsequent dwindling applicants to the university that lasted for four years and nearly bankrupted the place.

The dinner that night was at The Sea Grille restaurant near the Tradewinds Resort. It had a room big enough to fit us all. The waiters there have this running joke with the older guests telling them to be sure to come back tomorrow because Jimmy Buffet was going to be eating there and maybe even singing a song. Strategic marketing move knowing your clientele’s taste.  Excellent seafood, great wine list and within walking distance, which given the copious amounts of wine we all over-imbibed on was a good risk management call on my part. Later that evening I decided to go for a walk along the beach. When I went by the swimming pool, I noticed some of my faculty colleagues in the hot tub.  Upon approaching them I could smell the mixture of alcohol, weed, and chlorine.  They were naked.  They also apparently invited some undergraduate students to join us there. The students were also naked. One of those students was the dean’s daughter.

I awoke at 1am to pounding on my door. I opened it to find two colleagues from the hot tub carrying a body wrapped in a towel. Oh Christ, did they kill someone is all I could think of at the moment. They laid the towel wrapped body on one of two beds in the room and unrolled the dean’s daughter stark naked and thankfully just passed out from too much alcohol. Though if you lit a match by her, she might have gone up in flames. I looked up towards my colleagues as they were running out the door. I threw a blanket on the dean’s daughter, whose name was appropriately enough Deana, and crawled into the other bed.

I awoke at 2am again to pounding on my hotel room door. It was a new colleague, Pat, with blood pouring out his nose like some Monty Python skit. Seems he was invited, well, actually ordered, into the dean’s hotel room a few hours earlier. From what I understand the dean managed to drink the entire bottle of scotch in one sitting. Mind you, that was an $1,100 bottle of scotch. Think John Belushi’s character Bluto Blutarsky in Animal House who chugged Jack Daniels and that’s what my dean did with that expensive scotch I had planted in his room, just as I had planned he would do. Unfortunately, Pat got verbally and physically assaulted by the dean.  In my planning I forgot to mention to my new colleague that one should never be around the dean when he is shit-faced drunk. Some people are sleepy drunks, some are silly, my dean was a mean SOB when drunk. Apparently, my new colleague was initiated in the dean’s ritual hazing of new hires. I never heard of the dean punching someone though.

As we lit up a joint, I heard a knock at the door. So much for getting any sleep tonight. I opened the door to find one of the students from the hot tub, still naked, and but now crying. She had gone swimming, skinny-dipping to be precise, with one of the male faculty members, a rotund, annoying man named Gil. She had stepped on a sting ray and got stung. I filled the bathtub with very hot water, told her to soak her foot in it, and I went to the front desk to see if they had tweezers. The hotel clerk didn’t seem fazed at all about my request. After all, this is a notorious spring break area and they no doubt have had stranger requests. After removing the stinger and washing her foot in soapy water, I asked her where Gil was. She said she had no idea. It was dark and he went in the ocean, and she went in to find him but never saw him again. Oh, my fucking God. He wasn’t very well liked but I didn’t want to drown the poor fat bastard.

Right on schedule at 3am, I heard pounding once again on my door. I opened the door and there was the dean. Hmmm, this could get awkward I thought, given his daughter is naked in one of the beds in my room and another student is naked in my bathtub. He invited himself in and sat on the bed where his daughter was laying completely covered by the blanket with luckily just her feet visible. He had come to find Pat and apologize. Being the smart man that he is, he had followed the trail of blood to my room. We lit up another joint and the dean and I reminisced about the time he gave me my hazing. We were at bar at 1am playing pool when he started his ritual. He told me I was a worthless, no-good professor that will never amount to anything, which was not necessarily inaccurate but isn’t quite the pep talk one expects from one’s new boss. Everyone in the bar was now staring at us because my dean was now yelling. We all laughed when I reminded him what happened next. I told him back then that we could either go outside and settle this like men (albeit intoxicated, out of shape, nerdy professor men) or get more drunk and play some more pool. We played pool until 4am. The dean looked at the toes sticking out from the blanket and remarked that his daughter had her nails done that same orange color too. What a coincidence.

Pat accepted the dean’s apology which I thought was more than a gracious gesture that the dean certain didn’t deserve given the blood-soaked shirt Pat was wearing. They got up off the bed, shook hands, and then Pat punched the dean right in the nose. Knocked him cold. The thud of dad hitting the floor woke up Dena. I then recalled in Pat’s interview on campus he mentioned he was a welterweight Olympic boxer in his undergrad days.  Could have gone pro. Could have killed the dean.

Another knock on the door. This is getting way too repetitive. This time though it wasn’t some drunken professor. It two members of the St. Petersburgh Police Department. They asked if they could come in and chat. I asked if they had a warrant. They said they could get one or I could shut up. They came in and looked around the room. Bloody shirted Pat standing over the knocked-out dean and a girl half asleep in bed laughingly asking if daddy is OK. At that moment the bathroom door opened and out strutted the naked stingray victim. She came up to me, kissed me on the cheek, and thanked me profusely and said she “had the most amazing experience of her life with me especially that thing you did with my feet”. Said hi to the officers and walked out the room. One of the cops gave me the thumbs up. I did my best to explain the events of the evening, how she was a stingray victim, and they merely rolled their eyes and said as long as she is of age, they didn’t care what weird kinky shit we get into. On their way out one of the cops turned to me and said, aren’t you guys a little old to be going on a spring break?

The next morning as we all met up in the hotel’s conference room to start our important strategic discussions (aka our excuse for this latest Bacchanal) about the future of the college, I looked around the room. It was like a battle site was nearby and this was the medic’s triage area.  The morning was uneventful probably due to everyone’s hangovers coupled with the vague sense of guilt coming into memory now of last night’s escapades haunting over them. During lunch we turned on the TV and a special news alert was on. Apparently, an object first thought to be a small whale had washed up on the shore three miles north of us. As the camera peered towards the object it turned out not to be a beached dead whale but instead it was Gil. Laying there looking, frankly, more like a manatee than a dead whale but nonetheless it was Gil. I thought I saw a fairly large pinkish barnacle stuck to his side.  I realized that no one – including me - missed his presence at the morning meeting. To everyone’s surprise on the beach, Gil stood up. The cameraman fainted but the camera was still pointing right at Gil’s groin area. Still completely naked from the night before. Ugh! Nope that wasn’t a barnacle I saw on Gil.  He smiled and started brushing the sand out of his big fat pink butt and his “barnacle”. The network cut the video feed but kept the audio going with an interview of Gil. In stunning detail for a man who the night before was so drunk that he had slept the entire night floating in the ocean, Gil recounted everything from our first night of the College retreat. Every little detail.  Identifying the university by name repeatedly. Unbeknownst to us, the video and audio went viral immediately and soon was being viewed and listened to across campus by everyone, including the president.

By 5pm we were all summoned immediately back to the university by the president for a meeting in the large board room. He asked what the fuck we were thinking. Our sandy feet and swollen red eyes did most of our talking for us. After the meeting, I handed the president my reimbursement form for the retreat in the amount of $13,000. I told him I had hoped it would have been lower but some of it was for the extra cleaning charge by the hotel in order to get all the blood stains removed. The president looked at me, oddly laughed, and said “you still haven’t topped the college of business’ last retreat”. I shouldn’t have followed up by saying “well, their retreat wasn’t broadcasted around the world for everyone to see and hear”. His memo to all staff and faculty the next day declared no more retreats will ever be allowed. Success!