By: Matthew Cullings, SFU Student
My palms sweat as my student ID slides through my hands. Butterfingers. As I draw nearer to the checkpoint, I feel the weight of a thousand bullets piercing through my skin. I wipe away a pound of sweat.
I approach the Centre for Accessible Learning (CAL) checkpoint. “What’s your name?” demands an enraged lady with a clipboard. “Spit it out, I don’t have all day.”
“My name is . . .” I try to respond, but she’s just so intimidating.
“I said hurry up or else I’ll send in the dogs! They’re hungry for some students with accommodations; they have the best sweat glands,” she responds while barking and howling at the roof. She begins scanning the line to assess the other students, as if she’s telling me to hurry the fuck up in a non-nonchalant way.
“Matthew,” I tell her.
“Your ID. NOW. You don’t want the dogs in here, do you?” She begins to bark and howl again, this time getting on all fours and intimidating me.
What the actual heck.
As I lower my hands and give her my ID, she places a plastic bin at my feet and demands that I put in any items I will need during my exam. This feels vaguely familiar, as if I have gone through the exact same trauma in another environment.
I, then, follow this evil woman into a holding room. There, I am patted down not with physical force, but with condescending eye movement from another exam assistant. I carefully place two HB pencils, an eraser, and a bag with snacks in case my blood sugar goes low.
“DROP THE BAG! DROP THE BAG! HANDS UP!” the lady screams. She snatches the bag from my hand and begins inspecting . . . almost like I’m at airport security. Ah, bingo. That’s why this feels so fucked up and familiar. My bag gets handed back to me in a desecrated state, torn apart to find illegal study aids.
As I walk out of the holding room, I am scanned once again by a thousand exam assistants’ eyeballs, all watching me take the walk of shame into the exam room. There, plastered over all the walls, are signs of students posing. Mussolini’s propaganda had nothing on this shit. “YOU’RE UNDER SURVEILLANCE,” they read. “WE CAN SEE EVERY STEP YOU TAKE, EVERY MOVE YOU MAKE. YOU CAN’T RUN. YOU CAN’T HIDE.”
Above my head is a watermelon with a Sharpie-stained dot in the shape of a camera lens in the middle. I’m guessing that this is the surveillance.
Inside the room, rows of students are in a similar position as I am in. Hundreds of exam invigilators pace the room, giving them side-eyes and demeaning stares.
To go to the washroom, I have to put a question sign up. Yet when I put the question sign up, I am verbally attacked and berated until I put the question sign down. What kind of brutal conditions am I working under?
I slowly feel my eyes shuttering, a reaction to the horribly dimmed lighting. Almost a bit more to go, you can do this! You’ve got this! An exam invigilator hisses at me, accuses me of hiding notes in my eyelids, and I fall to the ground.
As I awake, I am at the security gate at YVR.
“Are you alright, sir? You collapsed when I asked you for your passport,” a voice calls out. I look up at a face. “Hey, are you from CAL? I work there part-time.”
“AHHHHHHH!” I get up. Then, the drug dogs come towards me as CATSA agents scream at me to drop the bag with my Diabetes supplies in it. I try to tell them that I can’t walk through a scanner because my insulin pump will malfunction — they literally don’t care.
All of this feels vaguely familiar. All roads in the airport security line lead back to CAL. Somebody call Carney, because I think more CAL staff could be hired at CATSA with little to no training required!
