A Non-Engineer’s Guide to Camping Out in Tech

It’s a Friday afternoon, you need to get some work done before you go to that theater party tonight and you’re tired of Main Library because that building looks like an alien spaceship ate 700 bags of Ready Mix concrete and took a 3-hour shit right on the Lakefill’s backyard.

So you figure now is as good a time as any to check out the dungeon where Dick Cheney sucks the blood out of goats Tech.

Allow me to inform you that you have fucked up now.

After 4 minutes and 35 seconds of trying to get the front doors to open in a manner that makes sense to anyone, it takes roughly 8 seconds for you to have no idea where the fuck you are oh God there’s no light in this building and I don’t know where the exit is HELP JESUS.

This picture was taken in 1936, shortly before all of these people disappeared forever. The woman is Amelia Earhart.

Now the most important thing at this moment in time is to take a deep breath and accept the fact that you will not be seeing the sun until Monday morning at the earliest. You’re in Tech, bro. You’re fucking LOST. But don’t panic. Hundreds if not THOUSANDS of people have made the same mistake you just made, and many of them have survived.

The first thing you’re going to need is CONSTANT VIGILANCE. At any moment, some creature – or worse, some engineer – could lunge out of the darkness and attempt to suck your soul out of your body via your mouth. Think Dementors, but with an uncanny ability to make laptops beep out the Super Mario theme song for hours on end.

Pretty fucking scary shit.

Assuming you’re human, and you must be human because you have no idea how to navigate Tech, you also probably require sustenance such as food and water. There is something called Tech Express down what may or may not be the world’s longest hallway, just off to the left. There you can find nothing worth $1.75 except arguably bags of Famous Amos cookies. Go ahead, buy 4 bags, you fat fuck.

By now darkness is most likely descending outside. Of course, you have no idea if it is or not because there is never any light in Tech ever. Or laughter. Or happiness. Regardless, you’ve had a full few hours (days? weeks?), and you need a place to crash for the night.

Unfortunately, the only places in the building that have carpeted floors are the classrooms. Getting a classroom to yourself in Tech is an ancient tribal ritual: very difficult to understand, even more difficult to pull off without years of training, and potentially extremely awkward if done incorrectly. The trick is to walk by the classroom doors very slowly. Veerrrryyy casually. All while peeking inside to look for signs of life. If you can find one devoid of man and/or man-made study supplies, YOU’RE IN.

At some point a janitor will come in to clean the room and ask you why the fuck you’re lying on the floor underneath 4 empty bags of Famous Amos cookies. Explain the situation. Usually he/she will escort you to the front entrance and send you on your way. It is very possible that you have been inside Tech for anywhere from 3 to 7 years, so you might have missed graduation. I don’t know how petitioning for that shit works, but you’re alive, in the sun, and have type 2 Diabetes from subsisting entirely off of cookies for the better part of the last decade. The world is your motherfucking oyster.

Aren’t you glad you camped out in Tech?