You can't get there from here

Being on a new campus this fall means getting lost. Finding the right building is the easy part. Finding a staircase in the building is also fairly simple. But the real challenge is deciding if it is the correct staircase.

The building that I my office is in and that I teach in is over 100 years old and was concocted in bits and pieces over time. And the result that the floor plans are pretty complicated. There are floors between floors. There are floors made of unconnected sections where you need to go to a different floor to get to the other section. Worse yet, not all staircases access all floors. It's so bad they long ago gave up on numbering the floors and named them by colors instead. And of course, the colors are NOT arranged according to the rainbow. (I think the order from bottom to top is green, yellow, black, silver, blue, red, yellow and brown, but I may be mistaken.)

But all that pales compared to this:

Two sets of stairs in a double helix arrangement! We're probably all use to that with escalators, but stairs? Worse, the two sets of stairs don't stop at all the floors, so you will often see students hop the handrails when they realize that the stairs they are in won't got to the floor they want, but that the other one will.

As for me, I know how to get from my office to my classrooms and back. I'll explore more in the future when I have a lunch packed, a huge bag of bread crumbs and plenty of energy.

Previous Years

September 1, 2011 - My Version of the Triple Witching Hour

September 1, 2010 - A New Basis for Measuring the Significance of Research