Holy flaming peacocks, Batman! It’s a glut of PhD students stuck in the stairwell!
From the first moment I set foot inside Robarts library four years ago, I shuffled through its various geometrical floors with trepidation and barely suppressed horror. Perhaps it was the sheer oddity of the polygonal space that set me ill at ease, after a lifetime of rectangular-shaped rooms; perhaps it was the thought of all those heavy books weighing above my head, just waiting to crush me as they plummeted through the thirteen floors; perhaps it was the blood red elevators going up and up and up. Regardless, my feelings towards the academically impressive, yet structurally horrifying, library had been tainted from the very beginning. And then it happened.
After all my years of fretting over worst case scenarios that never came to be, last month I was trapped on the thirteenth floor of Robarts that fateful day the fire alarm sounded. And it wasn’t a drill. Doctoral candidates emerged from their carrels like bugs out of woodwork, undergrads using the library computers to MSN left their boyfriends hanging. Everyone just stood up, and stood there.
It became apparent after about five minutes that this was no test, and the fear became palpable in the air. Everyone tried to appear calm, laughing and joking with their study buddies as they filed into the stack stairwell which was clearly marked “NOT AN EMERGENCY EXIT.” Sheepishly, embarrassingly, I followed them down, despite the capital-case writing on the wall. My remembrance of the small and inconveniently placed directions for what to do in case of fire faded into mass panic oblivion.
I swear to Gutenberg, when I was descending floors six through four, I became notably hot in temperature and began to feel as though I couldn’t breathe. But the fates were kind that day, and it turned out that the repository for books dating back to the Renaissance did not, in fact, catch fire.
What worries me is that, although I expect this ridiculous behaviour from myself, on any particular day it could be argued that some of the brightest minds in Canada are circulating through that building, and nobody could find the bloody fire exit. Isn’t this the group of people in whom we are placing our trust for a better society?
I remember while traveling to Victoria this past summer, consciously tuning out the flight attendants giving the safety spiel so I could finish the last ten pages of a George Eliot novel. Although the ending was wicked, this, clearly, was not smart. It was also the same tendency that left me, and countless others, hyperventilating in the library last month.
It is time for all of us bookworms to reassess the importance of the world around us, in relation to the world between the lines. If we get too lost in our studies, it’s not just our social lives that will suffer.
