One of the biggest issues I have seen in my brief time at OU thus far is something I believe everyone else on campus can agree with me on: campus parking. With the recent and hectic weather, the issue of parking has become increasingly atrocious. Just last night, after running around Norman scrambling for a last minute Halloween costume, I returned to campus with hopes of securing my car under covered parking. This is something especially important to me because last April, my own car was completely destroyed in a hail storm in Texas. Now that I have a newer, nicer, and more expensive car, I get really paranoid about the hail.
So, I am sure you can imagine my frustration after I drove through the Cross parking garage and found not a single open spot. Not even illegal spots were open. There was a car parked in front of every cement beam, within every lined space, and even in front of every elevator/stair nook. I drove through the garage at least five times to make sure there wasn’t some hidden spot I could snag last second, but in the end no luck.
It was after this that I decided to try the Jenkins parking garage. I originally didn’t go here fist because it is usually the first place to fill up and there is less parking available for students living on campus because of all the commuter and staff spots, but again, I thought I might be lucky enough to find one. I was sadly mistaken. There was not a single spot even close to being available. This parking garage had all the same poor parking qualities as the Cross parking garage did but with people parked in all of the commuter and staff spots (illegally, mind you), and people parking in the middle of the driveway and in other pathways where you should be able to turn. Most of the cars were blocking other cars and other people in!
It was the craziest thing I had ever seen in my whole life. People were so desperate to protect their cars from the weather that they were legitimately parking anywhere even remotely close to being covered. So long as their car was somewhere under the parking garage then it was fine.
I can’t lie to you though, I did attempt to snag one of those illegal spots in front of an electrical area and an elevator where I thought I could maneuver my car, with hopes to just come back the next morning to move it before I got a ticket. Unfortunately, in what I believe to be an act of karmic justice, I packed my car into one of those stupid yellow poles. Right in front of someone trying to drive past me. A man. In a very large truck that would not have been able to fit through the space between my illegally parked car and the persons on the other side. I was so embarrassed and pissed off I decided I was just going to park my car by the dorms, out in the open where it could be obliterated. But alas, my paranoia got the best of me and I ended my perilous journey for parking at the residence of my sorority big, Heather, where I found partially covered parking. Not the most ideal location considering I had to walk twenty minutes back to the freshmen dorms at 12:30 AM. In the pitch black, alone, with a dead phone. Luckily, Norman is a relatively safe campus, but the fear is always there, especially as a young woman.
In conclusion, the University of Oklahoma has some of the shittiest campus parking possible for a school located in tornado alley. If they’re going to continue raising our tuition, they might as well use some of the money to give us a little security for our cars.
Comments by Hollie Perdue