Picture this: you need a quiet space for a quick Zoom meeting on campus. You fly through the AQ, WMC, or wherever, looking for an empty classroom. You find one! Go, you. But moments after you log into the Zoom meeting, a line starts to form outside the door. Students waiting to use the room for their 12:30 p.m. class are looking in, wondering who the strange person gesticulating wildly into their computer is.
Well, nine times out of 10, they’re a fellow student in need. And what they’re in need of is a goddamn, up-to-date, semesterly list of available campus rooms at any given time. But SFU, in all its finite wisdom, doesn’t offer anything like that.
Sure, you can book a room in the Library at the Burnaby Campus, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about a critical offering for students needing to spend 15–20 minutes of their day on a Zoom call for an interview or a pitch meeting, or to just have a moment to themselves without the fear of some first-year tepidly peeking their head in and asking, “is this the tutorial for Archeology 203?” No, it’s not. Come back in 10, you little shit.
And lest we chalk this up to some entitled student throwing a fit over an impossible-to-provide service, it’s important (and shameful) to note that UBC — with a student population and campus size that dwarfs SFU — provides such a service! And if those thunderbird-humping, gondola-lacking, vanilla-AF egoists can figure it out, then surely we can too.
Let’s not let SFU off the hook. Count up your classes, and show your work to the student population. At long last, one of the Lower Mainland’s most engaged universities needs to match the technology of a bathroom door handle and show folks whether rooms are vacant or occupied.
