What, Me Worry?

When I graduated from law school this summer, I was filled with happiness.

This was not because I got a law degree -- the feeling that accompanied that rather terrifying thought was not unlike the feeling you get when, after fiddling with the old lawnmower for hours, you finally get it to work and start to celebrate, only you then look up to see acres and acres of untamed lawns pockmarked with random sinkholes, dead trees, and live moles. And it's going to take you 40 years before you're done with it and can go back inside and have some lemonade and a nap.

No, the happiness came from the fact that leaving law school also meant never having to deal with all the awful things that came with the package: classholes, jammed elevators, the VPN, Quasimodo of the Tower's smell, and a perpetually rising urge to kill.

Perhaps chief among those horrible, awful things were the B.U. emergency texts.

Much like the aunt who keeps giving you Christmas sweaters every year, the powers that be at B.U. feet it is necessary to assault us with emails, texts, and phone calls every time something happens.

And when I say "something," I really mean "anything." I remember once getting the following 4 texts, which I present to you now in the order of their arrival:

B.U. Emergency Notification Alert System Message Alert 3 of 4: building.

B.U. Emergency Notification Alert System Message Alert 2 of 4: Ave is out. For the time being, no electric devices will work in the

B.U. Emergency Notification Alert System Message Alert 4 of 4: We will notify you of any change of status and post you with continuous updates as they become available.

B.U. Emergency Notification Alert System Message Alert 1 of 4: Please be advised that the electric power at 876 Commonwealth

And post us they did. For every actual emergency, such as someone on campus with a knife (this turned out to be the pub cook), we had ten "emergencies" which involved anything from a malfunctioning elevator in a freshman dorm to a 10-minute power outage at the business school.

And don't worry about missing anything. Within anywhere from one minute after the event began to five hours after the event was over, we would be bombarded with dozens of text messages, countless emails, and a handful of phone calls. If B.U. was a girlfriend, they would be a Stage 5 Clinger.

Look, I know they were trying to make sure we all knew about the emergency to promote safety and awareness so we would take the necessary precautions in the event something awful happened.

But goddamnit all to hell, it got to the point where I would have chosen not knowing about the fire at the law tower until the flames were licking my back as I jumped out the window than having to get yet another text from the university.

When I graduated, I thought I would never have to get these texts again. I thought they were in the past, never to be heard from again, like emails about potential Animal Law courses and LLMs asking what the Simpsons are.

But today my phone beeps. And I look at the text. And it's from a five-digit number.

Urge to kill . . . rising.