Beauracratic rant.

I apologize for going off on a tangent here but I'm a little frustrated. This weekend the 3 Abilene universities are hosting the Tasa(Texas Association of Schools of Art) conference. The university I teach at has been giving the art bldg a bit of a makeover the last few weeks. The ceramics room has never looked so clean-they even washed the 12' windows floor to ceiling. They cleaned my office which has stuff piled up everywhere dating back to the eighties. Fair chance that it's never actually been "cleaned." This is all good and fine and makes sense to me. They repainted all the walls in the building for a pretty penny(thankfully it didn't come out of the dept. budget) though I'm sure we could've had it done just as good or better for much cheaper, but I'll even let that go. What I won't let go is what's in the photo below. I asked for a dozen new kiln shelves last semester that we really needed and was told it wasn't in the budget but maybe next year we could get them. Today I walk into the bathroom and notice a plumber replacing all the faucets(worked perfectly fine) and drain assemblies to these fancy(=expensive) faucets and chrome drains. This is where I draw the line. I understand that this comes out of the univ. budget and not the art dept but how can they possibly justify dropping $2000+(my estimation for the bathroom work) on something as unnecessary as fancy faucets but I can't get a few hundred dollars for something that my students actually NEED.

Rant over, my apologies.