Opinion
North Hall still buzzing with wasps in November
November 16, 2016
If you have the misfortune of taking class in North Hall this semester or having a club that meets there even within the late hours of the day, I applaud you. If you don’t then please let me inform you of why, within even the latest of the fall months, we are still assaulted by a troupe of hornets and wasps determined to not die.
Where do they come from, what do they eat, how are they still alive in late fall? These are the questions students are forced to ask themselves as they fend off tacks with wings.
As you sit within the lecture hall in North Hall, you are able to get very familiar with the anatomy of wasps and hornets during your geography, art, music and math classes. Every five seconds one will dive close to your head and then take off, almost as if it is a joke. The strong-willed will sit there with a hornet on their shoulder, struggling to limit movement as they write the meaning of Polaris and true north. The weak-willed will eventually give up, walking out of their lectures to escape the tiny bodies filled with rage.
Amongst all of us, however, there are heroes. During the length of a lecture you will hear a variety of slams and claps as people hopelessly compete against these creatures for domination of the hall. Like valiant knights, they raise their hardcover Riverside Anthology of Literature and, like a ring of a town’s bell, a thud will call out afterwards. Such acts of bravery should be responded to with whooping cheers or at least a half a point of extra credit.
After snow’s first fall, will we still be applauding the efforts of those with strength much greater than us? Or will the wasp menaces lay deep within their graves of garbage, having been swept up by the school custodial staff? Perhaps they will never truly leave us, or lay in wait as they did in early November lulling us into safety for a matter of days.
Has the school noticed? Have they accounted for the idea of a thousand iterations of anger constantly messing with the student body? Does the budget cover cans of Raid? Most importantly, how many people have been stung?
My suggestion for the university is to either hire an exterminator or take cautions to lessen the population of wasps. Such actions that could be taken by the university include sealing windows, reducing the swamp-like heat of North Hall or hiring teachers aides to patrol classes armed with high quality fly swatters.
While wasps are also present in other buildings on campus, they seem to gather nowhere else as en masse as within the warm, moist climate of North Hall. As they are far away from most students and interact mainly with administration members, the university has deemed North Hall too unimportant to worry about. North Hall has become for wasps a lawless wasteland, where any remotely aggressive wasp actions are considered acceptable and no one dares to question it.