I have been working in George Mason University’s Robinson Hall Wing A since 1993, but last Summer my entire department was moved to Wing B as preparations began for the “Core Campus Project,” a major renovation effort that will replace all these brutish brick buildings with towers of metal and glass. Rooms will be high tech and multi-use with unobstructed sight lines and an abundance of something called “natural light,” a substance my colleagues and I have only read about in books.
The plan for us is to inhabit Wing B while Wing A is dismantled, and it has been an interesting experience so far. Not only did we watch our old offices be devoured by mechanical dinosaurs, but we were treated to frequent tremors that feel exactly like those from the Virginia earthquake of 2011. The tear down is nearly complete now, but for several weeks I felt shaky, even after I left the building, like I had sea legs. This was probably useful to disrupt the muscle memory of 25+ years that has me running into dead-ends where the exits used to be; the construction means that the campus is an ever-changing maze of fences featuring murals of what the new spaces are going to look like, right down to our SIM replacements.
Doesn’t this chick here look like Elizabeth from The Americans’, in disguise and looking for Oleg Burov.
(That’s an extremely witty joke that I stole from my friend, Deb. Oleg was studying “Urban Transit Planning” at an unrecognizable George Mason in season 6).
A lot of my colleagues and students are sad/sentimental about the tear-down, but I’m thrilled. Goodbye asbestos! Goodbye terror-vators! Goodbye laminated-on-the-floor digestive system! Goodbye winter bats and summer wasps!
Helloooo Robots. While we are surrounded in dust and rubble, there is a new weirdness to embrace: food delivery bots. Construction machinery is brutal, enormous, and intentionally inelegant, but just add zippy little white pods on wheels to get that post-apocalyptic feel you’ve been missing. The bots are freaking adorable, and they have everyone on edge, especially as they navigate uneven paths or crowds of kids staring at their phones. I saw one pause to let a squirrel pass. Someone told us she found one stuck in a patch of snow, and when she shifted it out, it thanked her. There’s a video on twitter of one of the bots tumbling off the edge of a concrete platform into the snow in slow motion. The video is set to Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel.”
So, I guess we’re a little twitchy around here, watching this mix of old and new while being shaken, literally, knowing that the old will succumb, as planned. It comes as no surprise that my colleagues are skeptical of the robots, but there’s only so much hand-wringing I can take. So, this old professor looks to the students for emotional guidance, delighted to find that their conversations are a lot less grim than ours. Today I watched an online discussion unfold about whether the bots were cute or ugly. The conclusion? It’s what’s on the inside that matters. Meaning, a cup of coffee and a scone, delivered to your dorm. And just like that, my mood brightened. And just like that, this has turned into a political post. I certainly did not see that coming.