This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Birmingham chapter.
- Dealing with umbrellas on the walk to and from the library when it’s both rainy and windy…. Deciding whether to put my umbrella up when it’s raining is one of the most difficult decisions I have to make. Do I put it up to avoid my hair looking wet therefore possibly mistaken as greasy? OR do I put it up to protect hair, just in case I meet my potential true love on campus, but look like an imbecile wrestling with it against the wind eventually giving up as it blows inside out every other minute? Life is *so* tough.
- Trying to wrap any type of packed lunch for the library in cling film…although cling film could be considered a pretty ingenious invention the level of anger it causes me to feel makes me consider putting my sandwich directly into my bag so that it’s contents gradually deconstruct leaving me with no food. Cling film seems to feel the need to constantly touch itself, wrap itself round itself, fold itself into itself, stick to various parts of my body, basically cling to anything apart from the food I want to wrap. I hate it. A lot.
- The library sweats… A classic issue that affects everyone who feels the need to dress appropriately for the outdoors in the winter months. Living in England obviously requires a coat from at least mid-October on-wards, which is fine, until you enter the library A.K.A, a sauna. The library sweats are so stressful. Not only are you under pressure to retrieve your student card to get in, it is also a race to remove all excess layers before any physical evidence of over heating appears on your face. I mean blotchy red skin and slightly sweaty upper lip isn’t exactly the strong look I imagined for myself as I left the house.
- Walking past someone you kind of know and not knowing how to greet them… Uni offers a variety of situations in which you can make ‘friends’; drunk chats at pre drinks, housemates of friend’s, people you were forced to work in a group with once, the list goes on. These are the sorts of people that you know & should really acknowledge but the whole thing is pretty awkward. The walk to and from the library offers a chance to bump into these people on nearly a daily basis and the stress that comes with knowing what to say is huge. Do you just wave? Say Hi and wave? Strike up a full-on conversation risking them continuing to walk past you so then you look like you’re asking thin air if they’re going out this week? I have decided the ‘anti-social’ approach is the most foolproof. To avoid this level of stress put in your headphones and furiously pretend to be composing texts all the way home.
- Searching for a plug socket once in the library. In the 21st century, where we can use our phone to speak to someone face to face despite them being half way up a mountain in China, you would have thought the provision of electricity would be fairly easy. Well at UoB library you would be mistaken. Despite there being nearly 30,000 students, UoB generously supplies us with one area in the library that reliably has a plug socket allocated to each desk (If you don’t know where this is I’m afraid I won’t be telling you as you are another person that will take up a valuable space). Congratulations Uni, you’ve managed to supply probably a hundredth of your student population with some electricity so they can use their laptops all day, don’t go too wild.