Nine years ago this month I retired from the faculty at Mohawk Valley Community College in Utica, N.Y. It was the end of 27 years of teaching everything from drafting to engineering dynamics and — you guessed it — hydronic heating.

One reminiscence of my time at MVCC always brings back smiles. It happened during my last few days at the college. I was sitting in my cubicle-with-a-door office thinking about how I would ever clean up what had been accumulating since Ronald Reagan took office.