Oh the Irony

The University of Georgia notified us in the spring that the cost of parking would increase by $120 a year beginning this fall. The mumbling and grumbling then ensued. Although I recognize the university’s need to break-even (public institutions do not exist to make a profit), I am troubled by the drastic increase over the course of one year. I am further troubled by the fact that the $480 it now costs to park anywhere close to my office on campus comes with restrictions. For example, I am required to surrender my right to park on campus during football games (unless I want to pay an additional sum). I wonder if cost of football parking will increase by the same percentage this fall. Additionally, I am allowed to park in one lot and only one lot. This is really surprising given the size of this campus and the fact that I must traverse it just to teach my classes. The counterargument to this is that the University maintains an excellent bus system to facilitate individuals’ movement on campus. While the bus system is quite good, it’s obvious that anyone making this argument has never attempted to use the bus system during class changes between the hours of 9:00 am and 1:00 pm. The result of all of this – I resigned myself to the fact that I will pay more for parking this year.

I went online earlier this summer and applied for parking (we have a weird lottery system – well, sort of). Today, I received an e-mail confirming that I had been awarded a parking space on campus – no real surprise as I am high on the priority list for the lots I selected. The e-mail told me that I would need to log onto the parking website to confirm my lot and pay for the privilege to park at the place where I work and attend school. I clicked on the link in the e-mail to complete this transaction, and a new window popped up. This was surprising as I have been through this process three times before without pop-ups. The pop-up was from Microsoft informing me that the site for the link I clicked was potentially unsafe and cautioning me that I might not want to proceed. Puzzled by this, I double-checked the link in an effort to ascertain what the problem was. It was immediately obvious – URLs do not contain the “@” symbol. This led to my search for the appropriate URL, which I did find, and successfully paid for parking. The irony (in hypothesis format as I am teaching methods this summer): As cost of parking increases the services related to parking decrease.