Near our office is a street light that a number of students use each day on their way to and from work. This is good, they are not jaywalking. There are a couple of large apartment complexes on the other side of our building from the light. (apartment complexes - our building - streetlight - campus.) A lot of people walk through our parking lot, up a little hill that happens to be a landscaped hill, not grass or cement, then across an empty lot to the light. We think this is a fine way to go, and use it ourselves quite often.
About a week or so ago, a grounds guy and his students came to look things over, the full timer started shouting at all the people who were walking up and down the hill.
The last couple of days, they have been over here working over the hill, throwing down manure, turning over the hill, etc. I think the thinking was that this would stop the people from walking on the hill. (Before I go on, I have to mention the types of things the full timer has been doing when he has not been yelling at people. These include extended trips to the restroom, leaning on a shovel, sleeping in the cab of their dump truck, etc. I have yet to see him do any actual work.) On Tuesday, they turned over thee hardened path that had been made, sprayed pink spraypaint with "Not a sidewalk" on the dirt, and stuff like that. After they left, I changed "Not a sidewalk" to "sidewalk". (We dislike the fact that the guy is basically on a vendetta and he is shouting at students. If he wants to shout at someone, he should come in our office, we are happy to oblige, but we would give at least as good as we got...)
Yesterday, the hill had the hardened path created again by 9am. I fugre if they really wanted to keep people off the landscaping, they dig back the hill and make an 8 foot retaining wall to stop it. Any other thing will not stop people from walking to the street light. We figure there will be a number of students who start jaywalking again iff this path is completely blocked off.
We have a couple of posts with a plastic chain that blocks the basement stairs in our building. (The has large portions of it condemned. That's another story.) I took these posts yesterday and put them on the hill right along side the path. This was not my idea origonally, but everyone else was chicken. We waited to see the implosion that was coming when Mr. Vendetta returned to see the results of the day. I went home to sleep for the afternoon before they came back.
Now that it's light, I see that they put up a number of posts with plastic chain in an attempt to stop the people from walking. This is not what I intended to happen with my little posts, but I think I gave them an idea. What made me laugh about it was even though the barrier was there, there was a single pair of footprints going up the hill. As I type this, 3 guys with snowboard bags have gone down the hill headed for the bus stop (looks like they are skipping class today to enjoy the new snow.) and they nearly broke the barricade. I fully expect to see it down sometime this morning.
1 comment:
Maybe you should start leaving little love notes for Mr. Vendetta, or cinnamon rolls, or a box lunch or something.... maybe he's just misunderstood, or working in a dead end job. Let's face it, there probably isn't much room for advancement once you're a head grounds keeper. The only pleasure you get from your job is the possiblity of being able to yell at a bunch of students who will most likely never have to work as grounds keepers again....
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