August 14, 2002

Wednesday, August 14, 2002

A summer day at Waterloo
I find a cup of coffee
Where the action was
The return to Needles Hall

Editor:
Chris Redmond
credmond@uwaterloo.ca

A summer day at Waterloo

Yesterday morning about 9:15 I started a stroll around campus, walking out of Needles Hall into heat that was already, as somebody commented, "brutal". (I didn't check the temperature then, but when I got back to the office around 10:30 I looked at the weather station home page, and they were reporting 26.3 degrees and a humidex of 36.1.)

I heard the steady roar of the air conditioning units on top of the Biology building, a more distant racket from the Centre for Environmental and Information Technology construction site, and a hammering from the almost-finished co-op building. One or two people walked by, then one or two more. I got the impression all morning that most of the people on campus were graduate students, whose work doesn't end just because undergraduate exams are over.

In the Modern Languages building, I thought at first that all the people had been vapourized -- dozens of pairs of little shoes stood empty, scattered along the floor in the first-floor hallway. But I found the owners of the shoes on stage in the Theatre of the Arts, all dressed in blue T-shirts that identified them as participants in the Arts Computer Experience day camp. "We're working on tableaux," a counsellor explained to me. Although "computer" figures in the name, ACE participants actually spend more time on the arts -- music, visual arts and drama.

The ML coffee shop was closed, and so was Tim Horton's. Howard Armitage -- accountancy professor and co-chair of the Keystone Campaign -- was just coming in through the glass patio doors as I arrived, and looked thoroughly taken aback when he saw Tim's without coffee, doughnuts or staff. "Yesterday was their last day," a passer-by told us.

I crossed to Environmental Studies I ("Use caution -- steps under repair," a sign said) and found its hallways empty save for a staff member who was refreshing one of the bulletin boards. A young woman behind the desk in the University Map and Design Library had no customers in the whole place. Leaving on the south side, I walked around the Humanities building, past a row of dark and empty faculty offices. A sprinkler was watering the bloodgrass in front of the Humanities Theatre entrance.

I find a cup of coffee

Skirting the co-op building site, I walked up the steps of South Campus Hall and into the bookstore, where at least the Bookshelf Café was open and had a couple of customers. Staff of the bookstore itself are deep in preparations for the fall textbook rush, of course. I was told that about 80 per cent of the books are on hand now, with the rest expected shortly.

The day before my walk had been Student Life 101, which meant a busy day for the store, with first-year students getting a head start on buying what they need. In the past couple of years, buying books electronically through ExpressBooks meant getting a discount; now the discount is gone, so students are shopping early in person. As usual, for lack of space in the main store, staff are putting some first-year math and engineering books across the concourse in the UW Shop, and that produced a boom in T-shirt and backpack sales during SL l01, I was told.

Crossing to the Doug Wright Engineering Building, I walked through more hallways that were mostly empty, just here and there one of the people I took to be grad students. An impromptu conference was under way in the chemical engineering main office: "What I can do," faculty member was telling student, "is I can write a letter for you."

In Carl Pollock Hall, I was surprised to find the engineering coffee-and-doughnut stand open for business. (The C-and-D on the third floor of Math and Computer also stays open between terms, I understand.) There were two or three customers, including a central stores mail carrier on his break, and I bought myself a "mini-size" butter pecan coffee for 40 cents, which I thought was a bargain.

There was hardly anybody in the CPH lobby, always a scene of bustle during term time. A woman was glancing at the plaques on one wall honouring the many Distinguished Teacher Award winners from engineering and the annual winners of the "teaching excellence" distinction given by the Sandford Fleming Foundation.

Some kind of construction was going on in the power electronics lab -- I didn't venture inside. The Engineering Society's "orifice" was closed, and a young man muttered as he read the sign on the door saying so. The office that deals with engineering's huge program of student exchanges was also closed: "Cindy Howe is on vacation," a sign explained. In a locked display case I noticed a clipping from the Record about systems design professor Carolyn MacGregor getting her head shaved the other day as a fund-raiser for cancer research. "Way to go Carolyn!" said a hand-lettered sign. The engineering undergraduate office was open, but only just. "It's been quiet today, but yesterday made up for it," I was told, and remembered Student Life 101 again. Looking through the door of something called the Fulcrum Nexus lab, I saw computers in clusters, but just one user, a young man in a black hat hunched over his keyboard.

I left the engineering complex on the east side, winding up by the ring road, where I faced a large sign advertising "Thirsty Thursdays" at a plaza restaurant. A truck promising "compressed gases and welding supplies" was idling at the Engineering III loading dock, while two men, one of them in a yellow hard hat, unloaded something from the back of it. At a picnic table beside the building, three construction workers were drinking coffee.

As I passed the site office for the CEIT, a UW Catering truck went by on the ring road, followed by the #7 downtown bus. The bus stopped in front of the Davis Centre and four men got off -- two with backpacks, two with shoulder-bags. A red Civic made a U-turn in the ring road.

Where the action was

The Davis Centre wasn't busy, but it wasn't empty either. There was one customer at the copy centre window in the lobby, a student in baggy blue shorts, and two maintenance workers doing something with a truck of fluorescent light tubes. The elevator chimed and opened, but nobody got in or out. Two men walked past me chatting in what might have been Arabic. The lineup at Tim Horton's (unlike the one in Modern Languages, the one in Davis stays open) was only half a dozen people long.

I saw a computer science professor emerge from a door, cross the corridor and negotiate a second door, all without raising his eyes from the book he was reading. His steps didn't falter.

As I crossed to the Math and Computer building I noticed a couple of trucks: "Artech Window Cleaning", said one, and the other was "Apex Motor Express". As I walked along the first-floor corridor inside MC, there was a rumble as of jet aircraft overhead. "That will be the morning delivery to the computer store," Roger Watt of information systems and technology told me -- just a cart on the floor above, presumably loaded from the Apex truck.

In room 1085, something that looked very much like a class was actually in session, the biggest crowd I'd seen all morning, maybe 20 people paying rapt attention to a young man who waved his hands at his PowerPoint slides as he spoke. A schedule taped to the door revealed that what was going on was a two-day workshop on scanning electron microscopy, organized by WatLabs. On day two, participants should have reached "energy dispersive X-ray analysis". The PowerPoint slide changed. "Peaks broaden as you increase in energy," I could read from behind the door.

I left the building by a route that's definitely not a "designated non-smoking entrance"; half a dozen people were sitting just outside, getting their fix. A fellow with a hose was ignoring them, watering the growth in a row of concrete planters. "Danger, men working above" said a sign from the window-cleaning company.

I walked over to the Student Life Centre, where a green plant operations truck was parked and three young men were digging energetically -- trying, as far as I could tell, to dislodge some kind of pipe with two mighty wrenches and a sledgehammer. Inside the SLC, Scoops was closed; Brubakers was open but might as well have been closed for all the business it was doing. The same was true of most of the shops in the mall downstairs.

But things were busy at the WatCard office, where manager John Cunningham said he and his staff took about a thousand pictures for new cards yesterday during SL 101 and will keep on cranking them out for the next several weeks. As we chatted, a young man walked up, looking slightly awkward: "I'm going to be a first-year student -- can I get a card?" Sure, said Lynda Eby, and put him in front of the camera. In seconds the machine disgorged his new card.

Cunningham noted that WatCards are being used for more things all the time. He's about to build new databases listing the students who will be living in the residences that have card-entry locks, including Mackenzie King Village and UW Place. At this moment, he told me, "they're running in the wires" to operate card-activated locks in Eby Hall at UW Place.

For some reason the Physical Activities quadrangle parking lot was doing a good business, with cars moving in and out. The main gym stood dark and silent -- nearby, a staff member moved equipment in a high-ceilinged storage room. On a door was a list of organizational meetings for Warrior teams this fall, some of them (football and soccer) as early as September 3. Interested in the Warrior Band? Show up at 5:30 on Thursday, September 5.

I crossed the ring road, noticing several ducks floating on the Health Services pond and several others more sensibly napping under a tree. Laurel Creek made a relaxing white noise at a tiny waterfall under the bridge. I remembered reading in the Record earlier in the day that Laurel Creek water is testing unacceptably high in phosphorus.

A group of children in white T-shirts were making a racket beside the rock garden: shake-out-the-fidgets time for one of the Engineering Science Quest camps. I walked through Biology I -- getting into the air conditioning was a relief after just five minutes outside -- and as usual I saw almost nobody, though voices were coming from a couple of the first-floor laboratories. A woman with an armload of books marked with Dana Porter Library stamps walked through the Chemistry-Biology underpass.

The return to Needles Hall

More white-shirted kids were clustered under a tree beside the Graduate House. I ducked into the Physics building for a moment, and when I emerged, I saw that the children were spread out along the top of the rock retaining wall, starting some sort of artwork on long strips of white cloth. "We're making bandannas," a gap-toothed boy explained. "We're junior ninjas!" his friend boasted.

I walked up the side steps of the Dana Porter Library. A man at one of the second-floor study tables had swiveled around to look out the window, his feet up on a chair, ignoring the pile of books beside him.

That was enough walking. I took the Needles Hall elevator back up to my office, and as I was getting out, Heather FitzGerald of the student affairs office was getting in, carrying a mountain of red fleece clothing. "It's the FOC vests," she explained, meaning uniforms for members of the Federation Orientation Committee during the early days of September. Preparations for the fall term are in full swing.

And there was a modest lineup in the graduate studies office on the third floor.

What else was going on yesterday, especially in the buildings that my morning walk didn't reach? Please drop me a note today by e-mail (credmond@uwaterloo.ca) for possible mention in the Daily Bulletin tomorrow.

CAR

TODAY IN UW HISTORY
August 14, 1981: The application deadline for UW correspondence courses is postponed because of a 45-day national postal strike.