Study­ing Again…

I devel­oped a new theory.

Canada is a cap­i­tal­ist devel­oped coun­try, with plenty of goods avail­able, a rea­son­ably effi­cient and non-corrupt admin­is­tra­tion and busi­nesses are quite customers-oriented. How­ever, all this change the minute you step foot on the uni­ver­sity cam­pus. Sud­denly, you enter another world.

A French exchange stu­dent I met in my class asked me recently if Canada was suf­fer­ing from penury. I assured her that indeed, we were doing okay. I know it does get cold in the win­ter, but thanks to our neigh­bors in the South, we don’t want for any­thing. She went on explain­ing that she often noticed empty shelves at the super­mar­ket and that she never seemed to find what she needed.

I would have dis­missed her claim if I hadn’t felt the same on the cam­pus. Indeed, things seem to work dif­fer­ently on these few square kilometers.

The other day, I had an hour break before my class. I decided to get a cof­fee at Star­bucks, con­ve­niently on cam­pus, and sit there for a lit­tle while read­ing my course mate­ri­als. I stepped in and joined the queue. There were about ten peo­ple in front of me, noth­ing out of ordi­nary for a rainy and cold day: we all need our fix of cof­fee on those ones.

After five min­utes, the queue hadn’t moved. I opened my book and started read­ing. Another ten min­utes went by and there were still eight peo­ple in front of me. Another ten min­utes. Finally, one of the barista (is that how we are sup­posed to call Star­bucks employ­ees?) moved from behind the counter to the queue:

—  Alright peo­ple, just to let you know, we are out of cof­fee and tea! So I repeat, if you want any cof­fee or tea, well, we don’t have any. Thanks!

I frowned. Er… Run­ning out of cof­fee in a Star­bucks is a problem.

Since I didn’t want what they had to offer — accord­ing to my under­stand­ing, that would have been plain hot water I guess — I left. Great. Queu­ing for almost thirty min­utes for nothing.

I crossed the street and went to the Sec­ond Cup. The queue went much faster (still a good twenty min­utes though) but this time, they had ran out of dis­pos­able cups. Er… okay. I sat there with my China mug, drink­ing my latte as fast as I could since every­body wanted a seat to do the same and left.

I also needed to buy a text­book. I did exactly what the teacher told us to do: I went to the student-owned book­store. I first climbed the stairs to the sec­ond hand books sec­tion of the store. A woman my age informed me that: “like, if (I) wanted used books it was totally cool but that (they) had kinda ran out of my text­book, ya know”.

I was directed down­stairs, to the new books sec­tion. I started queu­ing in the tiny store. After ten min­utes, I real­ized the queue was all around the stores, and was there­fore about four times longer than I had expected. Never mind. After twenty min­utes, I was given a lit­tle piece of paper and a minia­ture pen, and I was told to write my class num­ber on it and hand it to one of the employee. When my turn came, I did just that. Even­tu­ally, the employee came back from the shelves and handed me a biol­ogy text­book. I’m men­tioned that I was study­ing polit­i­cal sci­ence. He replied that biol­ogy was a dif­fer­ent sub­ject. We both agreed on that but couldn’t fig­ure out why my text­book, sup­pos­edly ordered by the teacher, was miss­ing. I left empty-handed.

I went to the uni­ver­sity book­store. I first attempted to walk though the door, like most peo­ple would have done. But as I was step­ping in, a secu­rity guard called me and told me to go through the other entrance — the one I hadn’t seen because it was blocked by yes, you guessed it, a huge queue. And why were peo­ple queu­ing for enter the book­store? Because all bags had to be left at the counter. Seri­ously. My wal­let in my hand, I browsed the store and found my book. Nearly $100 and a twenty minute queue later, it was mine. I then queued again to reach the counter where I had checked in my hang bag — I was almost sur­prised I wasn’t searched, I mean, it’s very easy to steal a bunch of ten inches thick books you know.

I could go on and on, but all the sto­ries are sim­i­lar. Attempt to do some­thing sim­ple, some­thing you do in every day’s life, and it won’t work eas­ily on cam­pus. Pho­to­copy­ing a few pages at the library? First, you must find change (and more dif­fi­cult, change that the machine accept since it seems to favor some 25 cents coins over oth­ers) to buy a pho­to­copy card. Then you have to load it. Then you have to fig­ure out how it works, because for some rea­son, the machines don’t seem to fol­low any log­i­cal inter­na­tional pho­to­copy­ing standards.

The most annoy­ing side of my cam­pus the­ory? So far, I haven’t been able to find a bath­room that actu­ally had some toi­let paper. I have been car­ry­ing a few sheets of my own paper for a few weeks now, like I used to do when we were trav­el­ing in Cen­tral America.

Related posts:

1. On Cam­pus (Part I)
2. Peñas Blan­cas — Chaos And Chaos…
3. No Dark Sar­casm In The Classroom
4. Gar­dens of Versailles
5. The Rideau Neighborhood