Irrelevance Glorified

(note : originally written in 1999)

I admit, I bet I’m a little biased on this one. Wait a second, I’m biased on every one of these. That’s the point. Anyways, my first year here at UIUC I lived on the 9th floor of Oglesby Hall, in which there are 12 floors. Incidentally, the elevators only go up to the 11th floor, so the poor 12th floor residents are fated to climb stairs anyway. But that’s another matter. Most University Residence Halls are a maximum of 4 floors high. Therefore, I feel it is only fair that residents of taller residence halls should only be be allowed to use the elevator to travel more than four floors. This is reasonable to me. However, I often found myself in the elevator, stopping at low floors, therefore delaying my appearance on the 9th. On the good side, whenever a person takes the elevator to a low floor, it unites the rest of the elevator. A definite bond is formed. It’s almost a sense of cameraderie, that hey “That guy was damn lazy!” It’s great. You have to be there.

Another thing that pisses me off is the elevators themselves. They are slow. They are the most irrational pieces of machinery I’ve ever seen. The “close door” button is purely for show. Any elevator system that is programmed so that if there is an elevator on the 1st floor already, and you push the up button from the first floor, the elevator goes down, they get an awesome amount of respect from me. The designers of the software must have been doing this on purpose, because no one could ever be this sadistic while being good-intentioned.

And now I make the startling transition to buildings that don’t have a cafeteria. I go to the Grainger Engineering Library, mostly because it’s just a great place to study. It exudes concentration rays. These rays are much akin to x-rays, and have been found to cause lab studies in rats. But I don’t worry. I’m invincible. But I digress. I am sitting on the second floor, on a really comfortable leather chair, and I stare across the room to see just how many people take the elevator down. I mean COME ON PEOPLE, it’s ONE floor. I could understand if you’re incapacitated, paraplegic, or maybe really really uncoordinated, but these appear to be well-coordinated people that are really, really lazy. Maybe not lazy, maybe just stupid. Maybe unaware that the distance they pace, waiting for the elevator to move them a height that they could be dropped from without serious damage, is quite probably more than the distance that they would walk going to the stairwell and down.

I take comfort in the fact that there could be a fire. Then, while these clueless souls look at the stairs, trying to fanthom its operation, I will speedily run down them and to safety, escaping unsinged. Perhaps, if I am feeling particularly giving, I will grab a cute girl to take to freedom, in hopes she will feel forever indebted to me. Yes, well, we can only hope.