So this was the first morning of “compulsory” orientation (I really wish they would pick a friendlier word than “compulsory.” It’s a very scary word to contemplate as you’re running across campus in the pouring rain on an empty stomach with your iPhone performing nuclear fission in the bottom of your satchel and thus not GoogleMapping your route to the venue of said compulsory event—I will get to this).
I set my alarm for 7:30 in the morning so that I could make it to breakfast and still have time to dash around like a headless chicken looking for my building.
Except I woke up in Aberdale with light streaming around my blinds, and my first thought was: AAAAAUGH. I overslept.
So I bolt out of bed and seize my cold, inert phone from my bedside table. I stab the home button to find out whether my earplugs caused me to sleep through my alarm (even though I’ve never overslept before because whether you hear it or not, there is some kind of subliminal percussion that happens when a phone starts vibrating on your bedside table). Except evidently my earplugs are not to blame, because my phone won’t turn on at all.
So I run to my laptop and flip it open, and it’s 8:45. Now, somewhere in all of this, my panic-addled brain decides that the orientation had started at 8:00 (remember this number, because it will become relevant later).
So I get dressed, upend my purse into my laptop bag, grab my laptop and phone (the latter of which has somehow begun to quiver violently with little emerald and cyan and burgundy lines running vertically down the left side of the screen), and set a US speed record for escape from Aberdare.
It’s pouring rain, and in my flustered state, I’m not wearing a raincoat or even a jacket. It’s luck rather than any prior planning on my part that my umbrella is still in my laptop bag from yesterday, although the wind is gusting and I’m afraid I’m going to blow away like Mary Poppins. Since I don’t have my orientation brochure (I ran out the door to fast to think of little things like navigation) or Google Maps (at this point my phone is quietly overheating in my back pocket with the flashlight strobing), I can’t find out where I’m actually supposed to be going. All I remember is the name ‘Percival Hall.’ Thank God it’s the name of a Knight of the Round Table, or there’s no way I would have remembered it from skimming the brochure two days ago.
I manage to waylay enough Brits with “hi i’m sorry i’m new and my phone is dead where is percival hall please” to find my way to Percival. In my first stroke of luck of the day, it’s only about three blocks from Aberdare.
I ask the security guy in the Percival lobby if he has any idea which room the international student orientation is in. He doesn’t; Percival is very large, and there’s always some event or another going on. He’s able to tell me that someone with a suitcase asked him for directions to Room 145 a few minutes ago.
So I decide suitcase = international student (I may have been predisposed to really, really want to believe I wasn’t the only one and hour and a half late). I dash across the Percival complex, and by dint of asking two more Brits for directions, manage to get as far as Room 145…which is cold, dark, and empty.
This is the point at which I remember, to my crushing relief, that I have a PDF of the orientation schedule on my laptop. I extract my laptop from my satchel and pull up the schedule. It says John Percival Lecture Hall 201.
So I waylay a few more Brits and find Lecture Hall 201 (which is in the other Percival building across the yard). I dash up the stairs and find Lecture Hall 201…cold, dark, and empty. My thought is that the orientation started there but evolved into a guided tour or else moved to a different location.
So I trudge back down the stairs, composing my own eulogy to be spoken at my funeral after my tragic death from either embarrassment or dismemberment-by-parents-over-Skype. I head out through the front doors, thinking maybe I’ll find a coffeeshop and drown my sorrows in caffeine. I get maybe a hundred paces before two things occur to me. First, it’s raining much harder than it was before, and I still have no coat. Second, I don’t know any coffeeshops on campus, and without Googlemaps to guide me back to Aberdare afterward, I really shouldn’t go exploring.
I trudge back inside. There’s a small canteen on the first floor of Percival. I sit at a table to contemplate my impending doom and ponder the disappearance of the entire 2018 spring semester cohort of international students. I open the brochure one more time to quadruple-check that I had the right room number. There it is, 201. But there’s another number that says 10:00. I glance at my laptop clock. It’s 9:50. It occurs to me at this point that if I hadn’t been so addled with panic from the minute I woke up, I would have remembered that the reason I’d set my alarm for 7:30 was not because orientation started at eight, but because Aberdare breakfast ends at eight.
So I catch my breath, wait till 9:58, go back up, and the lights are on and 201 is filling up with my fellow international students.
My phone is still hot and dead, but I’m praying it’s under warranty.