Parking Chronicles: I missed class because I couldn’t find parking

Martina Bretous/Entertainment Director

It always starts out the same way: a race to the elevator entrance at the sight of anyone entering the garage followed by a head popping out of a lowered car window yelling “Are you leaving?”

Four years at this University and about 60 percent of conversations I overhear consist of three things: complaining about parking, complaining about textbooks, and more complaining about parking.

From the Starbucks line in the Green Library to the elevator ride in MANGO, everyone is wondering why finding parking on campus is so difficult. Or rather venting out their frustration in an expletive-filled sentence.

A few years ago, when I was a freshman full of optimism and hope for the college life, I pictured entering the Gold Garage every day, parking on the first floor available to students while singing to great music on the radio.

I should have known from the “great music on the radio” part that my fantasy wasn’t going to mirror reality. The radio is like the artist Pitbull, it takes great music and ruins it with an awful remix no one ever asked for, or is that just 96.5? Either way, I digress.

I had big freshman dreams no one could crush. That was until I missed a class on the first day of the spring semester because I couldn’t find parking. Now, as a senior, I serve as a cautionary tale for every freshman who seeks to enter one of the three garages I now call the evil three: Gold, Blue and PG5.

To my surprise, parking is just as daunting for faculty as it is for students. With multiple floors left exclusively to faculty, I assumed the only trouble they had was finding one too early and having to kill time. But, you know what they say about assuming.

While standing in front of the pay machine for visitor parking once, a faculty member and I realized we were members of the FIU community paying for parking.

We jointly shook our heads in frustration, paid our hourly fee and went about our day. Nowadays, I alternate between that and what everyone does: creepily and aggressively following students from the elevator doors with a blinker marking them as mine for the next 45 seconds until they reach their car.

However, for every parking spot you’ve gotten quickly, there’s a time you followed someone who says they’re “parked around the corner.”

You breathe a sigh of relief, silently laughing at the poor suckers still waiting for a spot. It’s not until a look of confusion sprawls across their face that you realize you’ve made a big mistake. They’re on the wrong floor, or better yet, the wrong building.

So for 75 cents a day, the daily cost of parking as stated in our tuition, you can continue to enjoy endless car lines in front of every floor of the parking garages and confused students who don’t know what floor they’ve parked on.

But wait, there’s more. If you call the University right now, you will also get unlimited access to the terrible individuals who ignore your blinker and steal the parking spot you waited 20 minutes and half of a Pitbull song to get.

One Martini, Please is a column that focuses on a range of issues affecting students.