Dear Editor:
It is 7:49 a.m. on a freezing Tuesday morning, I’ve been up for the past two hours and 15 minutes. I’ve been trying to go back to sleep for the past hour and 45 minutes. The other half an hour I endured the sound of metal scraping against the hard ground of the walkway outside my dorm window. That’s right, the sound of metal. Scrrrrrrrrrraping. Against the ground. For half and hour. It was torture.
It had snowed all day yesterday, and I guess the administration thought it would be a good idea to send out a lone warrior at 5:30 a.m. to brave the cold and do some snow shoveling outside Gregg and Lien, and goodness knows where else. It must have occurred to them that snow meant that students’ lives were in danger because anyone can slip and fall. But I guess what they didn’t realize is that the ground was covered with less than an inch of harmless powder snow. And I guess what they also failed to take into account is that hundreds of students use that walkway everyday and thus would have trampled the powder to oblivion and gotten rid of the threat. The last thing the administration didn’t consider, and the most important one, is that the walkway is literally two inches away from Gregg, and that shoveling snow at 5:30 a.m. would wake up almost everyone who had a window next to the walkway. In trying to protect the students (which I’m sure is what the goal of this whole operation was) from the harmful elements of nature, the administration in the end actually caused great grief to the students by depriving them of the heavenly thing we call sleep. Now we will drag ourselves to our respective classes, red-eyed and pumped full of coffee and Advil, complaining to our friends about the evil snow-scraper and shooting our professors annoyed glances. Perhaps some of us have a test today and will score fewer points because we didn’t get enough sleep. Maybe some of us don’t have time in our days to take naps, and so would come back at the end of the day exhausted and hit the sack right away, thus wasting even more time; time could have spent doing something better is now dedicated to the sleep that we were robbed of at 5:30 a.m.
Now what should have been done? The guy outside my window scraping snow off should have been armed with a salt shaker instead. That way, it would have saved the poor guy some energy and a lot of students hours of sleep. What an ingenious solution! You might say. Hopefully the administration would agree with me and try this out next time. But for now, I, like many other students in my dorm, will have to go make some coffee.
-Tiffany Wang
Class of 2009