I’m writing this post at approximately 0110 hours on Monday morning in UC Santa Cruz (UCSC), sitting at the desk of my room in a College VIII campus apartment ready to go to bed after a nearly two hour long fiasco trying to get into the apartment.
The reason I’m at UC Santa Cruz is because I am attending the annual University of California Computing Services Conference (UCCSC). The UCCSC is a gathering of IT and computing related staff from the various University of California campuses who share ideas and collaborate with one another about computing related services and technologies. It is a great place to meet other IT staff from the other UC campuses and to get new ideas and concepts to adapt to one’s own department or campus.
Anyway, most of the attendees are staying in the UCSC campus apartments, which are suite-style apartments where there are 3-4 rooms in one suite with a shared bathroom, kitchen, and living room arrangement (typical college dorm room suite-style lodging). In order to get to one’s own room, the guest must use a key card to swipe into an electronic card reader which allows entry into the suite. Then a standard key is used to enter the individual room.
Earlier this evening, I went out with some colleagues from UCR to walk around downtown Santa Cruz. After a few hours, we returned to campus and I went back to my suite only to find out my card wasn’t working. So I called the campus dispatcher who notified the campus apartment personnel. A few minutes later, a second person who is also staying in another room in my suite came back to the suite and tried his card, only to find it didn’t work. Obviously there is something wrong with the keypad. The campus personnel arrived several minutes later only to also tell us, yes, the card reader is not working properly, and that there is no way to open the door without breaking through physically. At which point my fellow suitemate and I were incredulous that this could be the case, but the campus personnel told us that is exactly the one reason why he was opposed to the new system. We were presented with the solution of getting to a new room or try to wake up the other suitemate in the third room who was possibly asleep inside. The first option was disconcerting for the specific reason that all of our personnal belongings, clothing, toiletries, and other items were in the suite.
At this point, I decided to try option number two. After several tries of knocking on the door repeatedly, I then resorted to throwing large pieces of wood laying around in the plant beds at the third bedroom’s window and strobe flashing my Surefire E1L through the window at the same time. Thankfully, our awakened suitemate appeared in the window after many repeated knocks on the window with thrown objects and he was able to open the suite door for us.
So two hours after I first arrived back at the apartment to find the card reader not working, I am back in my room typing this, ready to go to sleep. Hopefully the story was coherent enough to convey this incredible fiasco. Anyway, I have to go sleep so I can wake up a little before 0600 (in less than 5 hours). Good night.
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