Where stands the grass

Photo courtesy of Anton/Wikimedia Commons

If you dare to leave your dorm, maybe bring an umbrella or a rain coat. It might not be raining, but you may nonetheless find yourself a victim of the sprinklers placed along the paths in campus.

Let me ask you this: would you want to be pelted by ice-cold water not even five minutes after leaving your dorm in the morning? Well, whatever your answer is, it doesn’t matter, because some genius, or geniuses, decided that the north side of campus needs a comical amount of sprinklers, nestled nice and snug in places where they can water everything but plants. 

I’m sure these things have caused at least some annoyances and inconveniences for a decent number of students over the past two or three weeks, and possibly even ruined some plans. I would assume you’re probably not thrilled knowing that at least a small fraction of your tuition is going towards keeping you wet and keeping the grass dry. Well, whether you dislike them, hate them, or utterly despise them, the one big question surrounding these glorified tripods is what exactly they are here for, because as someone who has to walk past nearly every single one to get just about anywhere, I can confidently say that they are not here to water the grass—they’re here to water you.

That is right. I believe that these sprinklers were deliberately positioned for the sole purpose of making you miserable, mostly because I find it hard to believe that people can be absent-minded enough to put four sprinklers in a row aimed directly at the sidewalk, thinking the grass will get watered. Well, maybe I should not find it that hard to believe; I did see someone sweeping a patch of bare dirt in the middle of some grass the other day. 

Still, the fact that every single sprinkler is right on the edge of a sidewalk, almost always in places where people are walking, often throughout the day, leads me to believe that the placement was deliberate. 

But oh, it gets worse. Not only are they placed in spots to ensure you get completely doused until you feel, and maybe even look, like a drenched rat— they are timed to catch you off-guard as well. Keep in mind, the grass isn’t getting so much as a drop as all this is going on. These things will go off at completely random intervals, which means that in most cases, you’re going to have to figure out a different way to get around them every single day— maybe even multiple times in one day—which becomes even more of a pain on the off-chance that they all get turned on at once, making them nearly impossible to evade. 

Plus, to make things even worse, these things don’t just go off when it’s all nice and sunny out; they go off during pouring rain as well. That’s right, you could be getting utterly drenched by pouring rain on your way to class, only for one of those three-legged atomizers to rub some salt in your wound by drenching you even further, because apparently, the rain is not enough to quench some grass’s thirst. Do not be surprised if the things are still active in the middle of January during a blizzard. 

And if you thought it stopped there, then you would be wrong. Somehow, they also manage to give anything their rain of terror falls over the appearance of having aged poorly over decades (despite the fact that it’s only been days), with rust marks mixed in with dirt and caked mud on nearly every single sidewalk. The torn-up grass, bare patches of dirt and mud, hoses snaking all over the place, and the little yellow chain barricades don’t exactly liven the area up, no matter how well they go with that chain-link fence right outside Jones. It is almost hilarious that these things somehow manage to make all that falls within their range noticeably worse over such a short period of time —you included—and that range unfortunately only seems like it’s going to grow larger and larger over time. Do not be shocked if, over the course of the next semester or two, you start seeing more and more sprinklers popping up right on the edge of sidewalks all over campus. They may even start popping up inside of your academic halls, residence halls, dining halls, and whatever other halls there may be for no reason other than just to be there.

In closing, I would like to encourage you, the next time you see a toppled sprinkler lying around, to thank whoever, or whatever, made it that way, because you were did a service, even if it was just some squirrel that ran into it and knocked it over. I would also like to say that if you haven’t encountered any sprinklers near your residence hall, there’s no need to worry. You’ll get your share of the fun soon enough, because whoever was the deciding hand in the placement of the obscene amount of sprinklers is obviously more concerned with getting you, and everything on you, drenched than they are with helping anything remotely close to a plant get hydrated.