US Student Life
This week is another week with beautiful weather up until today, when the temperature suddenly dropped back to 10+ celcius. Now I have gotten a little bit more hang of the seasonal change here that goes up and down, and taking along your mood with it. I have to quote my house mate's words for the feeling induced by these fluctuations - one has to get used to constantly being mocked/teased by the weather to live here.
Student life ain't easy here!
Moving onto the life this week, there isn't anything too interesting except the armed robbery happened on Tuesday, which led to a 4 hours campus wide lock down. Sounds aaaaaaamusing?
1. It all started at 8.15am when some robbers robbed a check cashing and financial services firm about 5 blocks away from the campus.
2. A helicopter arrived here 15 minutes later and started circling and hovering over the area, searching for the suspect and making the students here wake up early for the first time in the few years they lived here.
3. Then 好衰不衰, someone reported that one suspect was seen heading towards the RPI campus. Being caring and cautious, the campus officials started sending out emergency messages and imposed a whole campus lock down while the TPD (Troy Police Department) searched the campus around 9.30am. Gunfire was reported at 9.50 but this allegation was later dismissed, the consequence of waking students up too early! Me on the other hand, being hard working and daring, had still decided to go to class at 10am .v..
4. Being very caring and overly-cautious too, my professor invited everyone to take shelter in his office because the doors of the classroom could not be locked. So there I was, sitting in the office while listening to the siren and alert messages being broadcast repeatedly over the campus's broadcasting system. 11.01am, the mayor twittered: "There will be some discussion with RPI about frequency, volume and content of their alert system message." I guess the campus officials got too excited because it was actually the first time that the broadcasting system was used since its installation after the Virginia Tech's incident!
5. To make things worse, a small electrical fire occurred in one of the laboratory on campus. Now you know how persistent are the students here, who continued to work in lab despite the excitement going around. The emergency broadcast had now turned into medley of itself and the fire alarm. 11+am.
6. 12pm disaster: my laptop was running out battery while the lock down seemed like it was going to lasting forever!
7. Alert ended at 12.43pm, yay!
banana robber attacked RPI!
99999. The next day:
So what is the story behind the whole commotion? Some random poor fella had decided to rob an office under the broad day light instead of late evening or night as usual. The allegation that the suspect was approaching the RPI campus then triggered the whole state of emergency. . . ... In the end, nobody was caught as of that afternoon, the suspect was not seen on campus and probably never came near!
Worst, the whole thing had not ended until today, for me. My 2 classes on Tuesday happened to lie perfectly within the time frame when the emergency was declared, giving me a holiday dropped from the sky. Consequently, I had to attend 6 continuous hours of Economics classes today to catch up with the syllabus, cheeeeeeeeers! =D Well, things could have gotten worse had the robber appreciated the fine weather and decided to took a stroll in the campus.
Lessons learned:
Students study harder to avoid unemployment.
Politicians work harder to provide education and employment.
Robbers check your watch please, you don't belong to the broad day light.
