The library swipe system, when it was implemented last year, seemed a bit silly.
Instead of taking my Husky Card out and feeling like a mildly–badass federal agent flashing it to the ever– vigilant library guards for admittance, I found myself awkwardly and frantically swiping my card at every imaginable angle to get that light green so I could run into the stacks and hide from the angry line forming behind me. I don’t get out much.
What’s the point of swiping in? Trying to prevent some sinister Roxbury resident from forging a convincing fake Husky Card and getting into the library? Was some non-student running roughshod through the library snagging MacBooks and iPads from those unfortunate students who answered the call of nature without bringing their entire fleet of gadgets into the stall with them?
After my first week as editor of the Huntington News Crime Log section last spring, I became painfully aware of the problem. We students, it seems, love to leave expensive things unattended in the open. Some weeks, nearly half the Crime Log entries were about stolen unattended items.
So the school’s solution was to make us swipe into the library. The move deprived me of my occasional secret agent swagger and educated us as to just how talented those proctors are, taking your card and – using skills I can only assume were acquired through extensive training from a seasoned Vegas blackjack dealer – always swiping it the right way.
But who does that really stop? Only non-students who are unable to make a convincing fake (it’s not hard, especially now that Husky Cards look virtually identical to Red Cross Blood Donor cards). So I have a few suggestions of my own on how to cut down library theft even more. Instead of hiring four people to stand there and watch us fail to properly swipe our cards, we could use those employees for other purposes.
First, let’s take the idea of Snell’s second-floor utopia of dual-monitor supercomputers and partitions made of upscale Ikea lamp shades a step further. By the time you sit down and get hooked into your NASA-scale workstation, you need a coffee. So let’s get a Starbucks up there, full service so they come to you. As you rock the socks off that excel spreadsheet “Minority Report” style, you can utter “Venti Latte” and three minutes later a jolt of caffeine lands in your outstretched arm. Since you’re already logged into your Husky account on that computer, they just charge your student account and you can continue to study for days on end, uninterrupted by the inconveniences of sleep.
That leaves one more problem: pee breaks. I can’t say for sure, but I can only imagine Northeastern undergrads have collectively had about 10 years’ tuition worth of iStuff stolen because the coffee went straight through and they didn’t want to be that creep walking into the bathroom with a laptop under their arm (I’ve been spotted a few times exiting Snell’s pristine facilities with my laptop and while it’s never been stolen, not many people shake my hand once they’ve seen that). So to really complete the caffeine-fueled academic wonderland that is Snell Library, let’s get the books out of the third floor (I mean really. Paper? Can’t they just put up more flat screens or something? Works for everything else.) and make it a giant, 100-stall bathroom with ergonomic toilets and dual-screen workstations in each. A conveyor belt system would keep a steady stream of lattes and pastries coming through and you could literally work all day, non-stop. No items stolen, never leave your desk for anything.
On second thought, maybe I’ll just learn to swipe my card.
– Taylor Dobbs can be reached at [email protected]
