Batten down the hatches, it’s move-in week

There’s a lot of upside to living in a town with one of the nation’s largest universities. We can go to any number of cultural or sports events throughout the year, there’s ton of shopping and restaurants that don’t belong in a town our size and we’ve got 40,000 college students pumping sales tax revenue into our city coffers. When you throw in the fact that the school in question also happens to be my and The Wife’s alma mater, it’s a pretty good deal.

But as the boys in Poison once waxed, “Every rose has its thorn.” For those of us living in College Station, that thorn is move-in week.

Imagine if 45,000 people were trying to move into your town in the space of a week. Next, imagine that about 10,000 of those people have never lived there before and don’t know where anything is. Finally, add in the fact that most of those 10,000 newbies are bringing their mom and dad along for the ride. It’s a recipe for mass confusion.

Much like Fight Club, there are certain rules for move-in week:

• Don’t try to park anywhere on campus, including your own reserved parking spot.
• Don’t go to the grocery store and expect to find non-perishable food items.
• Don’t even think about going anywhere near Target, Wal-Mart or Sam’s Club.
• Don’t go out to eat unless you have several hours to wait for a table.
• Don’t drive in town. If you must, multiply the amount of time that it will take you to get somewhere by a factor of four.
• Don’t think the car ahead of you has any idea where it’s going. It will make several sudden lane changes and probably go over a few medians while looking for its destination.

Honestly though, the problem with move-in week is not the students. In fact, they’re rarely ever a cause for irritation around town. It’s always the old people that cause the major headaches.

It’s the father trying to cut across six lanes of traffic to get a barbecue joint. It’s the mother making sure she squeezes each roll of paper towels before selecting one to purchase. It’s the parents who can barely drive their SUVs trying to back a U-Haul truck into a space the size of a telephone booth.

Memo to “helpful” college parents: it’s not always like this around here. Most of the time you’re not here. And we live happily.

Helter skelter in a summer swelter

One of the bizillion students moving in this weekend was my brother, although he was just relocating from our spare bedroom to his new apartment. It’s new as in “new to him”, as it’s the same place I lived my senior year and it was pretty much the cheapo dump in town then. I’m glad to see that in six years, not much as changed.

It’s not that bad of a place, but it falls into that category of apartments that are acceptable only for college students. You wouldn’t want to start your family there or have the bunko group over for an evening.

His apartment was okay, but it had one glaring problem – the air conditioner wasn’t working. That’s a major problem when the temperatures are hovering around 100° and the heat index is a fairly decent bowling score. We had a magical time assembling a futon in his room in the heat. By the time we were done, I think both of us had lost several pounds.

Then we went and ate a huge dinner and both got extremely sick to our stomachs. Good times.

Fun at work

I’ve been working on a project a work for the past couple of days creating a brief orientation video for some of our new faculty members. My boss wanted it to be short, irreverent, memorable, and get a particular point across.

Although the script and narration are not my work, the incredibly intricate graphics and snazzy music are. Here’s what we came up with: