What? Ask for directions?

The other day something happened to me that’s never happened before: I got lost on campus. In fact, it happened twice.

In my frantic and desperate attempt to avoid having to park in the Ponce garage and ride the shuttle to the law school I parked in a far off lot that I had never seen before. (You know, the shuttle that supposedly runs every 4 minutes but that actually goes about once every 15-20 minutes, but not at the peak times when classes are about to start or when they end and only if the driver isn’t scheduled for a break, and sometimes there will be 30 people waiting for a shuttle but the shuttle (or sometimes two shuttles) will be parked on the side of the road 200 yards away and for some reason refuse to drive to the shuttle stop (or better yet, parked at the garage 20 yards away from where 30 people are waiting with the driver behind the wheel and the engine running but she won’t get her ass moving to the stop) …yeah the lack of parking at this school is a problem that will never be solved as long as they keep letting in too many students (kind of like how one of my classes is limited to 28 people not because the prof wants a small group but because that’s all the room will hold…nice) but the most frustrating part is the administration’s complete indifference and its inability to make the shuttles run efficiently – they say it’s contracted out to a private company so they have no control. Right. The parking shuttle service here is a joke. It’s pathetic that this private institution can’t have effectively functioning parking shuttles. It’s embarrassing that a school that charges so much has shuttle service of the quality you’d expect at a third-world airport.)

Anyway, so I parked by a huge auditorium that was either under construction or renovation or something. I had never seen this building before. I walked down the sidewalk in the general direction I thought the law school might be in until the pavement ended. I kept going but there was a gaping hole in my way. Yes, I was almost prevented from coming to class by a crater. It was being dug out by a couple of guys with a backhoe.

This is a big school. I know maybe 20 percent of the campus because I’ve ventured off the law school campus and surrounding area (wellness center, food court, bookstore, undergrad library, etc.) only once and that was a year and a half ago before school started and I walked around the entire campus. I had no idea where I was. None of the buildings looked even vaguely familiar. Then I saw a building that looked vaguely familiar (at first I didn’t know why it looked familiar but then I realized it’s the building I spend about 4 hours a day staring at when I’m looking out the window, um, I mean studying in the library) and I made it to the law school, safe and sound. (Sorry I couldn’t provide a more dramatic ending. I just thought it was something that I got lost).