Why the deuce did I drive to school on Friday?

Like many other Wright State students, I began my Friday morning by commuting to school in the middle of a snow storm.

I had never driven in snow before, let alone a blizzard like that. Being a freshman, I don’t know what it takes for the university to close down, but if we were in attendance on a day like Friday, it doesn’t seem that campus will ever close due to weather. My personal experience commuting to school on Friday was not as rough as others, but that doesn’t mean it was any less dangerous. The unplowed streets in my neighborhood caused my car to skid around even though I was only going about 20 miles per hour.

Ironically, the highway was much safer for traveling, despite the fact that the my fellow drivers and I made our own lanes on the highway because the lines were not visible. It was particularly scary when maniacs would zip past like it was any other day.

As I have been told by several of my peers, the traffic only got worse as the day went on.  Despite leaving her home thirty minutes early, my bio lab T.A. ended up arriving an hour late.  By the time she arrived, the class had already completed the day’s relatively short lab.

Another friend of mine, left her home twenty minutes earlier than usual and ended up missing her exam because she spent an hour in stand-still traffic on 675. According to her, she and everyone else were sitting on the highway for so long that they were able to put their cars in park.

Some people exited their vehicles to smoke, while others sat in their vehicles and browsed the web on their smartphones. By the time she arrived on campus, her exam had been over for forty minutes.

I would argue that campus should have been closed on Friday, although the fact that we were in attendance means that there are many people that disagree with me.

Getting to school on a day like Friday is doable, but it would require everybody to be prepared to leave their homes significantly early and require everybody to drive slowly, cautiously and patiently. Even with those criteria intact, the unpredictability of driving in snow could still prove to be dangerous and it is still possible to be held up in a ridiculous amount of traffic.

Of course, that is provided that people would cooperate and do those things, but let’s be honest, there will always be people out there threatening the lives of others with their carelessness, and there is no way we can all leave our homes early enough to get to class on time on a day like that.

Wright State has far too many commuters to justify keeping the campus open on Friday. I have never seen so many ambulances in a single day before. I even saw one car on the side of the road that was facing the wrong direction which can only mean that that driver completely lost control and spun out.

With all of this said, I believe that having classes on Friday was a mistake. While some of us had to drive over the unplowed roads with the snow still beating heavily on our windshields, others were stuck in so much traffic that they completely missed the classes that they left extra early to attend.

Unless your first class of the day was in the late afternoon or evening, Friday was a miserable and dangerous day to travel. The fact that so few professors didn’t cancel their classes astounds me.

With so many students staying home and skipping class on Friday, and with so many others arriving late and/or getting in accidents, is it absurd to think that maybe the university should have been closed on Friday, or am I just taking crazy pills?