I sit writing this on a comfortable futon in my off-campus apartment. It’s Tuesday morning, the first day of February. The world outside is encased in ice. Just a few hours ago, I broke my ice scraper into several pieces trying to clear off my car so my girlfriend could go to work.
I look down Washington Street toward Beeghly Library. The buzz around Facebook and Twitter is that there’s a power outage and that the sidewalks aren’t salted. As of 9:55 a.m. no one has broken a leg. Yet. But I might be the first as I make my way down the street. I do not have people to put down salt for me. I’m two blocks from the library but for some reason I am perfectly happy here.
Part of me wishes I still lived on campus. I would probably be standing at the top of the hill on front of Smith (if I could even make it up there) with some sort of apocalyptic sign. I would be dressed in black and I would have a trash can next to me, flames coming up from it as I burned something. Like in RENT. I would probably be burning flyers from events that happened two weeks ago but were still hanging up.
But I’m still in my bathrobe and sitting at my house. I’m waiting for the emergency Connect-ED system to tell me what’s going on. Should I go to my meeting for the Transcript? Should I do the homework I haven’t done yet? How are people going to eat if the power is out? Have the B&G generators kicked in? Has anyone slipped yet? What the hell is going on?
I keep waiting for campus-wide emails to pop up on my phone and tell me what’s going on, too, but I know that won’t happen. If I understand the email system correctly, someone in administration has to approve all the campus-wides before they go out. And there’s no way they can do that. Because there’s no power.
Either the administration is still deciding what to tell us, or it is just complete chaos in University Hall. The only people I can really rely on are my fellow students. But they aren’t telling me anything new.
I hope today is a lesson for the rest of the year, in case we have something like this again. Which we might. In case the Tea Party hasn’t noticed, global warming is real. And that’s why we have such extreme weather. Plus, it’s Ohio. You never know what the sky is going to dump on you in Ohio.
I understand that we’re a residential campus and that people have the capability to walk (that is, if the sidewalks are salted). What about our professors and commuter students, who have to drive? What about off-campus students like me who have to slip and slide to campus? If you’re going to ask us all to come, you should at least let us all know what’s going on and not just leave it to Facebook and word of mouth.
And for God’s sake, this was all in the forecast. Couldn’t you have asked that salt was put down last night so that B&G didn’t have to risk killing themselves today? I don’t want them getting hurt either, of course. I don’t want anyone getting hurt in this weather. That’s why I’m a strong proponent of snow and ice days.
By the time everyone reads this, it’ll be old news. And I know that people bitch and moan about snow every year. But it still deserves to be said, in my opinion. No matter how “residential” your campus is, icy sidewalks aren’t safe. Freezing rain doesn’t give a shit how many feet Hayes is from the academic side. It’s still going to come down. Sleet is unbiased: even if everyone lived in dorms it would still be on the sidewalks, waiting to kill us all.
I’m ready for some summer up in here.
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