Great Escape

There are three types of people on the streets of the west end at three o’clock: drunks, men in hyperreflective vests sweeping, and me.

My first (and only) assessed paper for this program is due in a few hours, and so yesterday lasted longer than days usually last. But while I made the finishing touches on this paper in the Masters study lounge last night, someone downstairs was locking the door (from the outside). When I finally decided to call it a night, I realized that I had no way of leaving. For a few minutes, I actually considered sleeping on the unintentionally retro chairs in the study lounge, but eventually decided against it.

Not wanting to kick open the door, as Chuck Norris might do, I looked for alternate options. What’s that old maxim? When one door closes, so opens a window? That’s not the case for the Philosophy department at LSE. The maxim would more accurately be: when one door is locked, and one attempts to exit a building in which he is trapped in the middle of the might, one ought not use a window, because he will trigger the building’s alarm.

I thought that leaving through a window was a reasonable course of action, considering that the only door to the building had been manually locked form the outside. [Which just seems like a horrible idea, especially because the building has a card-controlled, electronic lock system.] Well, as I leaned toward the window I’d chosen for my escape, I triggered the alarm, starting a barrage of bells, wails, buzzers, and flashing lights. I waited at the only door to the building for five minutes before realizing that no one was coming to open the door or to stop the wailing that was reverberating through the building (and campus). I made a call to campus security, who seemed shocked that there was an alarm going off on campus and that I was trapped in a building.

After twenty minutes, someone finally came. But, unfortunately, he didn’t have a key to the building. [Another horrible idea.] After enduring ten more minutes of the sirens, he returned with the key and freed me.

The Walk to Class

The Walk to Class