I normally try not to complain about stuff like this but the Tech parking system has enraged me enough that I just had to vent somehow. Recently they replaced the perfectly good pay as you leave parking system at the physics building guest lot with a prepay machine filled with problems for no apparent reason.
Well there is one obvious reason: so they can write more tickets and further screw over their students! They probably make more money on the tickets than the actual parking charges. In the old system no tickets were issued and students would simply pay for their parking as they left.
Now they write $25 tickets for any car whose time has expired and sometimes even write tickets when the cars have paid for parking, such as this morning when I got a ticket despite having paid for more time than I spent in the spot. Half the time the machine either doesn’t accept credit cards or cash and sometimes it just quits accepting all forms of payment causing more people to go unpaid and thus letting them write more tickets.
When it breaks you can call the help line but they just say they’ll send someone to check on it and hang up on you leaving you with the option of missing class to wait around or risk getting a ticket by leaving and going to class. The machine usually doesn’t give any change but it will happily accept your $20 bill for $1 worth of parking.
They should be able to find ways to make money without purposely screwing their students over like this.
John Hankinson
PHYS grad student
More than forty years ago my first job was at Tech selling Wink and peanuts at Grant Field. Unfortunately, even though I am a native Atlantan and lived here all my life, I can’t say I have spent too much time on North Avenue. And that may continue. Last week I treated my family to a baseball game and what a game it was for Tech. Our son pitched for the visitors and clearly the Yellow Jackets have a chance to win the College World Series this year.
Our concern and the reason for writing is my wife, mother and father are physically challenged. As we approached the baseball stadium, there was no handicapped parking for visitors. There were a couple of spots for faculty/students with permits.
I could not find a police officer to ask, only a couple of workers driving golf carts who simply shrugged their shoulders. I circled around and dropped them off at the gate where the buses pick up and after a couple of honks by the bus driver, headed off to find a parking place. The closest handicapped parking places without a “permit only” sign was at Alexander Memorial Coliseum.
We had talked about coming back the next day to watch Tech play again, but, without the necessary convenience, we decided it was too much trouble to go through again.
The twenty dollars or so from lost revenue would break neither the athletic program nor us. But, it begs the question: is Tech risking the loss of potentially millions of dollars by ignoring simple and straightforward federal laws that require a certain number of handicap parking places be set aside at federally funded institutions? I’m not sure if the Americans With Disabilities Act covers this issue at college athletic venues, but my guess is that it is a strong place to start looking.
For all the students, especially those student athletes, best of luck this semester!
Edward Randall
OSCAR requirements stifle humanity
Colleges are supposed to be places of thought. They are a source of teachers and teachings, sources of the possible. We are stifled by the bureaucracy of administration and this bureaucracy constantly tries to categorically describe what it considers to be beneath it: in our case: by major, year and now by race.
I encourage every student to not answer the “race and ethnicity” question which currently is being forced upon us by OSCAR. No one should be forced to classify themselves as other than human.
I will share that my ethnicity is “American”, which is not even an option in the survey. I appeal to the student body, the administration and the government to accept that we are human, and that any classification of race or ethnicity marginalizes achievements made our pursuit of the possible, and for that which makes us human.
Brian Degnan
EE grad student