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Parking

I tend to think that the lack of parking for the n-thousand employees where I work, even after recently spending tens-of-millions on a (too-small-even-when-planned [1]) parking garage, was just general bureaucratic ineptitude.

But since the general result is that you have to come in early to get parking, and you can’t leave to take an off-site lunch, one wonders if the powers-that-be [2] are working to some different goal. Like the goal of ending the usual scientist thing of wandering in late and working late. And taking a long lunch. By which I mean, an hour.

Doesn’t matter to me. I bike in most days; there’s rarely a lack of rack space [3]. I bring my gluten/legume/grain/dairy-free paleo FODMAP lunch.

But I can’t schedule a doctor appointment for the morning and expect to drive straight on from the appointment, then work late, which is a PITA. So I schedule everything for 3 pm and leave early. Counterproductive, I’d say.

Still, Hanlon’s Razor. Though that razor is getting pretty dull nowadays, when there really are just bad intentions.

 
 
[1] Seriously, even the planning documents show that the new garage would have fewer spaces than the lot that it was replacing, and that’s before the hiring freeze was lifted. Apparently no one in admin noticed, or cared.

[2] The same ones that think that open-plan is a good idea for a bunch of anti-social Ph.Ds working on wildly different projects mixed in with BA folks who spend the day yelling on the phone.

[3] Except for the aspirational lunchtime mountain bikers. There’s always a couple of them in circulation who bring their MBs into work and lock them to the racks, on the theory that they’ll go up the Brown Mt trail at lunchtime, until the bike is dusty, rusty, and flat, and someone leaves a note asking them to move their once-nice, now-POS spacetaker. Then it’ll eventually leave, only to be replaced shortly thereafter by someone else who also will make it up exactly one lunchtime ride before their bike slowly degenerates into a rustbucket while taking up hardcore commuter space. Not unlike the people who get lockers, then use them exactly twice.