Some catalogs sell 3D plastic puzzles that come in four or five of the most oddly shaped pieces with an object stuck inside that is impossible get out.
Well, the people who made those puzzles, along with the inventors of the Rubik’s Cube and the creators of the “Magic Eye” books probably designed the Business Building as well.
In my two and a half years here at VCU, I’ve had at least one class in the Business Building every semester. I still have no clue what the layout of the building is like.
This may seem like a petty issue, but I think it’s a common nuisance. Whenever I raise this issue with friends or classmates, they agree that the Business Building is five floors of optical illusions.
Finding restrooms in that building is like a magical quest in a video game. It suddenly feels like the halls turn into a stony, torch-lit maze and one must wind his or her way to the magic chamber of relief before their kidney-bar turns red.
Normally people just walk down a hall and perhaps make a turn or two to find a bathroom. In the Business Building, people must circle a floor, stop, turn, walk halfway around the floor in the other direction, stop again, turn, walk the other way again and then they find the bathroom in a spot they’ve already passed. At that point, it doesn’t matter since they’ve wet their pants.
Taking a different route to a class is also a major problem. I take two or three different routes to my classes in the Temple Building regularly, two for the Life Sciences Building and I took a million different routes when I had classes in Hibbs.
Yet once I memorize my route to a class in the Business Building, I never venture from it because it always ends in confusion. If I leave an umbrella in a Business Building classroom and I return to retrieve it using a different entrance or staircase because it’s closer, I will wander around for five minutes on a floor I’ve walked across three times a week. I thought that it wouldn’t be difficult since most buildings have a simple layout.
Now I know that I was wrong and I’m waiting for the day when I can turn my head around in time to catch the corridor behind me magically morph into a completely different hall.
Then there is the stupid bridge to Oliver Hall. How does that bridge work? It should allow students to open a door in Oliver Hall, walk across the bridge and open another door into the Business Building. It should work the other way around as well.
Instead it feels like you open a door in Oliver Hall (and I think I’ve heard that door softly laugh at people because they’re screwed) and you cross the bridge, open another door and then there is a staircase. And whichever way you go will either lead you to a floor that you wouldn’t be on if the basic laws of physics worked or somehow it will lead you to Canada.
That problem would be easy to avoid except occasionally there is a class or a professor’s office that says something like “2118 Oliver Hall.” So you go to Oliver Hall, look all around, find the rooms end at something like 2113 and start again at 2123. Then you’ll finally find a small sign that says, “Rooms 2114-2117 are across a bridge to the other end of the building and on a different floor, 2118-2120 are across the Main Street bridge, and wouldn’t it be nice if rooms 2121-2122 actually existed, you suckers? Ha ha ha ha.”
So you have to follow the second set of directions. By “Main Street” you’ll think of the evil bridge from Business to Oliver. Of course that makes no sense. Why would you cross a street into another, separate building?
So maybe VCU should have a pamphlet of clear instructions as to how the hell the Business Building (and perhaps Oliver Hall) is set up. Or better yet, make sure room numbers are set up properly. Or at the very least, provide more golden keys and magic potions along the way so we can gain more points on our way to the bathroom.
Lisa Chun may be reached at bureacrat85@yahoo.com