It’s a jungle out there

On any given afternoon in the Business Building parking lot, students are circling around and around the lot hunting for a parking spot. The whole ordeal reminds me of some sort of animal behavior, a parking lot filled with circling vultures.

Every driver circles around the lot with a mission to find a parking spot. Hopes are high when someone exits the Business Building, hoping that person will get into a car near yours, but the rush passes when you realize the walker isn’t coming anywhere near your car. So the circling begins again until your moment comes when there is finally an opening and you pounce into it like your life depends on it.

Then across campus we have the same situation except every lot is faculty and of course you drive down the commuter road and no spots are available so you think, “Hmm…I have two options.”

One, you could risk the whole thing and park somewhere so you won’t be late to the class where the professor has a strict no tardy policy. If this option is chosen, expect at least one parking ticket which just contributes to the $8,000 a week Ferris makes on parking tickets. Where is that money going anyway? It certainly is not going to improve parking.

The second option is a little bit less risky but requires parking as far away from campus as possible, because after all, who doesn’t like walking for fifteen minutes in six degree weather? I know I do. So you begin the trek toward campus avoiding huge mountains of snow and black ice. You begin to walk past the commuter lot thinking, “If I had parked here I bet I could have been to my class and back already.” So you continue onward and you finally approach civilization, you glance across the road and there’s an empty parking lot. Excuse me, an empty faculty parking lot. Now if this situation only happened every now and then I probably wouldn’t mind the bitter cold hike, but unfortunately this is an everyday sad truth.

I understand some extremely lucky people out there might be thinking, “This has never happened to me, it can’t be that bad.” Well, you are lucky. The rest of us will just keep circling campus for a parking spot until someone says, “Hey, how about this new thing called a parking ramp?” I heard they are all the rage these days. n