Parking? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Parking!

Thanks to some idiot planner, the contractor chosen for the college’s parking lot project, chose this lowest bid which resulted in this major project to take place during the first week(s?) of Fall classes. As a result, parking and driving on campus has become an exercise in futility. What the fuck were they thinking? The signs for an epic failure were all there if anybody bothered to look.

The first sign that doom loomed on the horizon was at the end of the Spring semester. Warning notices began to appear on the college website saying that for the summer sessions, there would be parking lots on the east side of campus closed and to plan accordingly. What could go wrong?

As the summer arrived and progressed, I wondered what parking lot was being renovated because it was halfway into July and I didn’t see any construction happening anywhere.

There weren’t even any roped off sections of pavement to give the idea that there would be impending construction. I wondered if the people putting the notices on the webpage were even working on the same campus and therefore unaware that their warnings were pointless.

By the middle of the last summer session, I knew that this college was in for some trouble if the “construction” didn’t get underway soon. Sure enough, as the weeks melted into August, registration for the Fall semester was winding down, and according to the splash ad on the homepage by this date, construction should also have wound down, however, it seemed to be only just beginning.

Finally, out there, encircling two of the larger parking lots was the bright plastic tape warning people to stay away of that particular area.

After some pointed inquiries, I discovered why this summer project looked to become the autumn headache it would inevitably become. When the college selected the contractor for the job, that contractor then subcontracted the job out to someone else. Well that other company must have been busy, and as construction goes, sometimes that means that one job can’t start until another one is done.

So despite the fact that the original contractor had agreed to begin and complete the project during the confines of June, July and August, their subcontractor had no such restrictions. Hence why we are practically about to roll into September and it seems like the parking lots are not going to be done for at least another month.

If I wasn’t invested in being there because of my job, I’d have said fuck it… and dropped the class I have on campus to take it somewhere else or online.

In the meantime, one entrance of the only two roads on and off the campus has been closed for the construction, causing a huge traffic congestion as people traveling from north, south, east and west of the campus converge onto the one open entrance on a two lane road, ALL AT THE SAME TIME.

There is no goddamn reason it should take me 30 minutes to get OFF campus in the middle of the afternoon.

No good reason at all. I am even less certain why it took me 45 minutes to drive the 10 miles from my house to campus. I haven’t experienced traffic this insane since my post-9/11 days in Mayport, Florida. Those were some nightmare mornings trying to drive onto the naval base before they built the bypass off Wonderwood, and sitting in the traffic this morning was giving me flashbacks–none of them good.

Parking is not so much at a premium as it is non-existent. Parking lots that during the summer were ghost towns, are now teeming with more activity than the parking lot outside a Walmart on Black Friday. It is pandemonium.

Every campus cop is out directing traffic. For this they pimped out the maintenance golf cart with flashing cop lights.

And since every campus cop is otherwise engaged guiding people on/off the main road, there are people lashing out with their own brand of parking vigilante justice: parking on the grass, on the soccer fields, no one seems to give a shit about stop signs anymore, much less pedestrians. Handicapped parking? What the fuck is handicapped parking?

This morning I saw people climbing over the rolling hills surrounding the campus like they were invading Normandy.

Where were they coming from? I don’t even know, but I guarantee they were getting on campus faster than me as I was sitting in traffic, waiting to get into the operating parking lots. This is madness. Complete and utter madness.

Seeing as how 100% of the student, staff and faculty population are commuters, that means that everyone is driving or riding on and off the campus every single flippin’ day. Therefore, this nightmare is going to continue as long as it takes for the subcontractors to complete the original job and return campus life back to some semblance of normality. Well, normal for this place at least.

I’m just gonna file this situation under “Shit that don’t make sense”…