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Also? Campus safety folks and WTA are teh suck.
Today, I was supposed to have my first psych and jazz classes, as well as a meeting for the SMFH.
Instead, I am stuck at the apartment. Sans car. You see, I tried to get to campus, but there was all this fluffy white stuff on the ground. I got there in the car, parked in the student lot at the ass end, and planned to take the bus up the hill to north campus, where all my classes for today are (and where parking is not.)
Unfortunately, some idiot WTA driver decided to get stuck at the bottom of said hill, and then got an SUV (ha!) stuck behind the bus. The bus I was on said "fuck that" and turned around and went back downtown, managing to hit a curb on the way. After about 20 minutes at the temporary transfer station (because of course, January is the perfect time to reconstruct the existing one), a bus with chains finally pulled up, and fortunately for moi, happened to be on the line that goes past my apartment (but does not go past campus.) Sensing that I was otherwise going to be stuck in the freezing mess in downtown, I hopped on, and here I am.
Early this morning, there was a light dusting of snow in the courtyard parking lot from a wee spit overnight--maybe half an inch. I'm sure the campus safety folks saw that and said, "Pshaw! 'Tis naught but powdered sugar. We shall delight in its wintry scenicness and think nothing of it." By 10 a.m., when flakes the size of dimes were falling like so much Divine dandruff, they should have reconsidered.
See, there's this modern, newfangled science called meteorology, in which folks with a jones for clouds and what they produce use schmancy equipment and a lot of math to tell us pathetic laypeople to expect the skies to open up and make our lives miserable for a while. While prognostication in this science is imperfect, usually, it's relatively easy even for plebes like yours truly to look at a radar map and say, "Holy shit! There's a precipitation mass the size of Vancouver Island about to collide with a cold front RIGHT OVER MY HOUSE."
Given such information, wise folks plan ahead and stock up with Sterno and s'mores. Wise people who are charged with ensuring the safety of ~20,000 students and employees of a large, regional university look at this and say, "By gum, I think this might be a corker, Bob! Given the facts that the city doesn't own a snowplow and approximately 95 percent of the local population doesn't know how to drive or walk on snow, we should think about pre-emptively closing campus to make sure no one gets hurt! Don't you remember the hellish storm we had just a couple of months ago?"
But, of course, that would be intelligent forethought, and we're Americans; we can't have that. What, are you some terrorist or something?
The somewhat happy ending to this saga is that the university does have a policy about inclement weather that allows students to miss a class if they don't feel they have a safe way to get to and around campus. Despite missing the first day of three classes, I shouldn't suffer too badly, especially given that one has a large Blackboard component and another has most of the in-class lecture material posted on the department's servers. The only really unfortunate absence is the SMFH's meeting, and I suspect they'll forgive me.
Of far greater concern is how the hell I'm getting back to my car. I'm guessing WTA might actually have most of their buses chained up within a couple of hours, so perhaps I can get back up to campus before everything freezes over after dark. I can hope.
Today, I was supposed to have my first psych and jazz classes, as well as a meeting for the SMFH.
Instead, I am stuck at the apartment. Sans car. You see, I tried to get to campus, but there was all this fluffy white stuff on the ground. I got there in the car, parked in the student lot at the ass end, and planned to take the bus up the hill to north campus, where all my classes for today are (and where parking is not.)
Unfortunately, some idiot WTA driver decided to get stuck at the bottom of said hill, and then got an SUV (ha!) stuck behind the bus. The bus I was on said "fuck that" and turned around and went back downtown, managing to hit a curb on the way. After about 20 minutes at the temporary transfer station (because of course, January is the perfect time to reconstruct the existing one), a bus with chains finally pulled up, and fortunately for moi, happened to be on the line that goes past my apartment (but does not go past campus.) Sensing that I was otherwise going to be stuck in the freezing mess in downtown, I hopped on, and here I am.
Early this morning, there was a light dusting of snow in the courtyard parking lot from a wee spit overnight--maybe half an inch. I'm sure the campus safety folks saw that and said, "Pshaw! 'Tis naught but powdered sugar. We shall delight in its wintry scenicness and think nothing of it." By 10 a.m., when flakes the size of dimes were falling like so much Divine dandruff, they should have reconsidered.
See, there's this modern, newfangled science called meteorology, in which folks with a jones for clouds and what they produce use schmancy equipment and a lot of math to tell us pathetic laypeople to expect the skies to open up and make our lives miserable for a while. While prognostication in this science is imperfect, usually, it's relatively easy even for plebes like yours truly to look at a radar map and say, "Holy shit! There's a precipitation mass the size of Vancouver Island about to collide with a cold front RIGHT OVER MY HOUSE."
Given such information, wise folks plan ahead and stock up with Sterno and s'mores. Wise people who are charged with ensuring the safety of ~20,000 students and employees of a large, regional university look at this and say, "By gum, I think this might be a corker, Bob! Given the facts that the city doesn't own a snowplow and approximately 95 percent of the local population doesn't know how to drive or walk on snow, we should think about pre-emptively closing campus to make sure no one gets hurt! Don't you remember the hellish storm we had just a couple of months ago?"
But, of course, that would be intelligent forethought, and we're Americans; we can't have that. What, are you some terrorist or something?
The somewhat happy ending to this saga is that the university does have a policy about inclement weather that allows students to miss a class if they don't feel they have a safe way to get to and around campus. Despite missing the first day of three classes, I shouldn't suffer too badly, especially given that one has a large Blackboard component and another has most of the in-class lecture material posted on the department's servers. The only really unfortunate absence is the SMFH's meeting, and I suspect they'll forgive me.
Of far greater concern is how the hell I'm getting back to my car. I'm guessing WTA might actually have most of their buses chained up within a couple of hours, so perhaps I can get back up to campus before everything freezes over after dark. I can hope.
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