Law Students

Men at work

Because finals are the best time to schedule construction jobs, the law school is currently in the process of replacing the Withers Brown rubber membrane roof.  The law school, in a couple of e-mails, has informed students that it's actually the university who's behind the noise and you should just suck it up.  This is a HUGE project.  Your grades are not.  From the administration:

It is a major and expensive endeavor to replace more than 44,000 square feet of roofing material.  It involves demolishing the existing roof installed 15 years ago, patching the concrete surface, and applying new insulation and a new rubber roof.  The project has been underway since September, and everyone on the third floor -- the Dean, the faculty, the administrative staff, and the students -- have been putting up with the noise since then.  The workers are working on one relatively small section at a time as they do not wish to remove any more of the existing roof than they can replace and make watertight overnight.

They do not work more than eight hours in a day, and never make noise constantly through those eight hours.  They do not work in inclement weather (they did not, for example, work on Monday) or on weekends. 

It's really great of them to not do the work on weekends and especially not during the inclement weather (that's when we're normally at the library). The good news is it may be coming to a close.

In recent days they have been working right over the library, but they will move over faculty and administrative areas in the coming days and that will lessen the sound somewhat.  In addition, there is a major expansion joint that runs directly through the middle of the concrete slab that forms the roof.  In general they have progressed to the point that they are on the northern side of that joint.  This means that, in general, the further south you are in the building (i.e., the closer you are to Massie Road), the less noisy it will be.

In the meantime, we get hilarious stories, such as this one sent in by a reader.  

So, I'm sitting here in the library at my top secret favorite seat, because it's got the best lighting in the place, just getting started on studying for my last final. Now, they're doing some sort of construction upstairs, and I can hear some guy going to town with a sawzall, which is about as annoying as all hell. (And by the way, do they really have to do this during finals week, I mean, man, the timing is worse than the time I spent my family's savings on AOL stock in 1999.) Now, the noise I can take, I've got good music on my laptop and it's just construction sounds, which I'd better get used to if I'm going to move to NYC.

Anyway, I'm sitting there, minding my own business, when I notice some white specks of something on the table. I'm thinking "no, my dandruff isn't THAT bad," so I look up and it's snowing drywall and other little particulate matter, and in a matter of moments it's getting bigger and all over my laptop, books, and myself. So I moved, and now I still haven't gotten any work done. Yeah, I'm going to blame my bad grades on the construction.

Gotta blame it on something, and this one quite literally fell into my lap.

We're going to blame our bad grades on readers sending us stuff we have to write about. Good luck bzzzzzz on your whirrrrr finals!

Full post as published by TJ's Double Play on December 17, 2007 (boomark / email).