When Nonslip Measures Backfire

For those of you who have anxiously awaiting this (If you really exist I would like to know), I am sorry that this post has taken me so long to get to. Allow me to defend myself as most of reasons for not writing this earlier are legitimate. First, well really the only important one is that I have professors this semester who feel like I don’t do enough of my homework on my own and feel it necessary to make us submit it for grading (I feel like my professors from last semester gave my current set of professors the “scoop”). Secondly, and this may seem like a trivial excuse (to the uninitiated), I have been catching up on second season of Community.

Okay enough excuses now down to the knitty gritty, this post was either going to be about crazy stalker squirrels or people falling on their butts. As I currently am lacking in the squirrel picture department (Spoiler alert: If any of you see a squirrel with a half moon shaped cut out on one of its ears please send me a picture it would be greatly appreciated) I decided to wait on that particular subject.

Allow me to paint you a mental portrait, imagine a young starry eyed transfer student the first day of classes at the Ginormous University (hah I love how auto correct thought this was an actual university name), with nary a clue on the intricacies of the campus.  And in midst of his awe he was stuck in the rain making a mad dash for the closest building.  To his chagrin what he thought was a non-slip surface really was a Venus flytrap for unwanting students which ends with him falling smack on his butt to the amusement of all the other students seeking shelter from the rain. Well most of this story is true. On my first day of class at USF as I waited out some rain under Cooper Hall and as people came running up the ramp to escape the rain, many slipped and fell. The surface was a non-slip kind but not “non-slippery” enough for this amount of rain combined with the angle of the ramp. The reason I remember this incident is as I walked by Cooper recently, I noticed that they have attempted to alleviate this problem with even more non-slip measures. If you can see in the photo the little black sandpaper strips these are the non-slip measures that I was talking about. Maybe this truly is to benefit the students, but it also deprives of us of literally minutes of free pratfall hilarity (Yes I have heard of YouTube).


Gregg Chaucer