For reference purposes for those who aren't Marist students. "McCann" is one of the two on-campus parking lots for commuter students (and is the only one not situated across the four-lane highway that students seem to keep getting hit by drivers on). Night commuter students are also permitted to park in the "Donnelly" lot, which is especially convenient if, like me, your class is in the Donnelly building. (map)
Marist will be hosting St. Peter's tonight December 6, 2004 at 7:30PM at the McCann Center. A large crowd is expected and all parking lots will be crowded.The McCann and Donnelly Lots will close to students at 4:00PM.
Other lots will be open and will be filled on a first come, first served basis. Security Officers will be at lots to alert people that the lot is full.
Athletics will run their shuttle service as usual.
You are urged to give yourself extra time to get on campus and parked if you are coming in for the 5:00PM or 6:30PM, class or to the game.
So, if you're coming to a night class, and you want to park in McCann, you're fucked. If you want to maybe park in Donnelly, you're also fucked. You should also expect to be fucked some more because the next most convenient lot "Beck" is also probably going to be full. I mean, it's full on a normal night, I can't believe it's not going to be full on Fucking Hellish Sports Night. There's mention of some "shuttle service", but no real mention of what it is, and I strongly suspect it's "we carry the sports nuts from the parking lots located in the Czech Republic over to the front doors of the sports complex", and not that it's actually useful for getting from said parking lot to, say, a classroom building.
This to me would ordinarily signify "this is a night to skip this fucking class", except that tonight is review for next week's final exam. I kinda suspect that might be an important session to attend.
So basically, the basketball program is completely fucking over most of the parking on campus, interfering with the actual educational process, which the majority of the students actually attend the school for, instead of it being some four-year-long farm system for the NBA.
Fucking jocks.
Maybe you'll be lucky and they cancel classes. It seems that everything else is being cancelled due to the snow that is coming down and the ice that is expected!
It would have to be snowing 10 feet/minute before they would cancel class. Well, at least that's how it is here. They figure if the prof can make it to class, so can you.
And yeah, the parking situation is lame. Did you ever hear back from anyone about this?
I sent three e-mails, one to the security dude who sent the mail, asking "WTF are commuters at night supposed to do?".. no answer.
One to the guy on the map page listed as the contact. No response.
One to the guy listed in the campus directory as being in charge of McCann Events and Facilities, asking "what about this shuttle thing is it for students or what?" type question, which drew a "I have no idea what you're talking about" response, leaving me oh-so-full-of-hope that there will be a useful shuttle service.
While I sympathize, this has little to do with "sports vs. education". Instead, it's the simpler (and much more common) "special event" vs. "regular joe users", in which the regular joe always loses out...
I don't believe I'm about to write this but: Not all can be blamed on Security. Marist as a whole yes but totally Sec no. During one of my many unscrewings of the security applications, I learned that security has no control over the parking during games. Things aren't coordinated with them. The Rent a Guards for the games are totally maintained by Athletics. The ones by the DN lot MAY be marist security but I don't remember right now.
And yes Athletics come first. Athletics gets more publicity then education. Have you seen the Library? Can you tell me where the books are? Yeah, I have a hard time myself. But there is some power sucking device every few feet. Because well damn it that looks good, shows how technologically inclined the college is, and that shit sells.
The sad thing is that thinking is now creeping into my department. It seems my new VP believes that if it is something that won't make us look good, then put it on the back burner, or just "put something up real quick" so we can get to the more attention grabbing projects. That's all dandy... but 90% of the internal projects we are working on , once done, will allow us to spend a WHOLE LOT MORE TIME on the publicity type projects. *grrrr* ...