If you take a walk down to the corner of Aylmer and Sherbrooke, near the eastern edge of campus, you will find a McGill building. This is no ordinary building, but a confusing labyrinth of dead-ends and key card-access doors that would make King Minos proud. Left is right, right is left, and half the time, the administrative staff seems just as confused as you are to what’s going on.
Problem number one: If you don’t know exactly where to look for something in the music building, it is very hard to find it. Room numbers mean nothing, and even the floors aren’t numbered correctly. You walk onto the main floor. Floor one? WRONG. It’s floor two.
Even before the new building was constructed, the old building was already divided into two wings: the east wing and the centre wing. The problems occur when we hit floors four and five (or should I say three and four?), where, due to the sadistic wish of the architects, the wings were split up. Want to get from C-504 to E-512? Well you’d have to go down two flights of stairs, run over to the other wing, go up two flights of stairs, and then use your keycard on the door. This whole ballet, which should only take about 20 seconds, can set you back more than three solid minutes if you’re prone to wheezing. This general confusion of all the rooms in the building leads the way for. . . .
Problem number two: Room E-106. This is the only regularly-used main-stream classroom in the basement, and you had better hope you never have to use it. First of all, it is a cave lit with fluorescent lights and dingy low ceilings. Second, it is roasting in there at all times, that is, fry-an-egg-on-the-floor roasting. Finally (and this is a curse in disguise), it always, always smells of cookies. Not only will this make you HATE cookies after about a week in this room, but it will add to the whole warm effect and make you sleepy as hell — valium sleep, not normal sleep. You never feel refreshed afterwards.
Problem number three: Override forms. As a music student, you will need to get these signed every semester. You pick up the pink form outside of the student affairs office. Then you get the professor of the course you want to get into to sign it. Then you need the signatures of the following people: your academic advisor, the head of the department of the course you want to sign up for, your grandmother’s fourth cousin Marie, and your best friend’s uncle’s cousin’s ex-roommate’s dog. Of course, the only time you realize you need a form like this is when class sign-ups start, so… either the summer, the exam period, or the very end of the school year. If you thought music professors were hard to find normally, just wait until the end of the year. The only way to catch one is to construct some sort of booby trap outside their office like a burmese tiger pit or one of those spring-loaded nets hidden with some leaves. Setting these up is a bit of a gamble, but what other choice do you have?
Problem number four: If you need to pee in the music building – good luck. You can either cop a squat in the corner of a practice room or try and fire one out an open window, but anything outside of that, and you are doomed to hold it in. It is fully possible that there are dozens of functioning washrooms in the music building, the problem lies in finding them. In my two years in the building, I have found three sets of washrooms. One set is near the performance hall in the main building, and is only unlocked some of the time. Another set is way at the back of the building and is the only reliable set in the building. The last set that I know of is a phantom pair that exists on floor five some of the time, and disappear when you try and look for them again. I have devised an equation for predicting the appearance of the phantom bathrooms:
[(Max running speed)(How badly you have to go)]2 =(Volume of laughter when you don’t quite make it)/(Length of urine stain on floor) Some words of advice: pee before you enter the building, or bring an empty bottle with you at all times.
