Photo illustration by Breanna Denney /Nevada Sagebrush
By Ali Schultz
It’s just one of those days.” Everyone has had a day like that, and if you say you haven’t you’re probably one of the many horrible people who also claim they aren’t hungry on a first date or that they aren’t driving a lifted truck to compensate for a lack thereof. Anyway, you tell yourself your day can’t get any worse, but, sweetheart, you are wrong. While you were taking your chemistry exam that you totally bombed, the parking enforcers rode in on their golf cart chariots straight from hell and smacked one of those makeshift tickets right on your dashboard.
There is really nothing that rustles my jimmies more than paying thousands of dollars a year to attend a university that requires me to pay a fee to park on campus grounds. If you ask me, the whole thing is absolutely absurd. I am already going to be a sweatshop slave to my student loan debt when I graduate, why should I have to pay a penny more than what is required to get my education?
Maybe I feel so strongly about this subject matter because I am a recently unemployed college student that can’t afford to buy groceries from Winco or pay my electric bill, let alone pay for the 70 parking tickets that I have somehow seemed to acquire.
What happened to good old first come first serve? Survival of the fittest. I want to see some raw Darwinism going down in Blue Lot, if you catch my drift.
It is a shame that students have to pay to park in East Jesus Nowhere, also known as “The North Lot” just to wait 15 extra minutes to hitch a ride to the Orvis Building. Hey, who knows, maybe if we keep our fingers crossed we might even be on time for our 8 a.m. class.
Currently, the only available pass for purchase costs $200. I don’t even know what $200 looks like. But what I do know is that I have $120 in outstanding balances and when adding that money to the cost of buying a parking pass that amounts to almost a full month’s rent or a presale Coachella pass. This really seems like a no-brainer to me.
Couldn’t parking services throw us a freaking bone here? Even our southern rivals have a better policy in place than we do. At UNLV students are only required to pay $125 to park for a full year. That is so much more reasonable than having to pay $200 for one semester of parking.
Although UNLV’s policy is definitely better than ours, neither policy is right. If Ali Schultz was deemed Queen of the Lots, she would grant free parking to all of her common Wolf Packers. But instead, we have little parking henchman running around with their ticket-happy mentality, robbing malnourished college students who have been living off of Rolling Rock and Top Ramen for the last six months.
The struggle is too real these days, my friends. Students have enough expenses to worry about. We need to pay our electric bill and still need to have rollover money for Imperial’s Wing Wednesday. The thousands of dollars we put towards tuition should be enough to reserve us a place in North Lot without having to pay a separate parking fee.
In a world where the University of Nevada, Reno beats UNLV in every sport and the Wolf Den never cards again, UNR parking services will cease the mandate to charge for parking and dismiss the pending charges for students with outstanding ticket balances so the fair Wolf Pack lords and ladies can live happily ever after with some extra cash to spare.
Ali Schultz studies political science. She can be reached at dcoffey@sagebrush.unr.edu and on Twitter @TheSagebrush.
