People say that college is the best time of your life. What they neglect to tell you is that it is also the most dangerous. No, I am not referring to binge drinking, date rape, dining hall food, or any other traditional scourges of college campuses. What I am thinking of is a far more realistic and fearful phenomenon: walking into people.
Do you have any idea how many college students literally bump into each other every day? 3,455. Ok, so I made that number up, the real figure is 2,433. Half of those are actually human-canine collisions (don't laugh, I once was slammed in the knee by a dog that was trying to chase another breed across the street). Regardless of the correct figures, walking collisions happen to me quite often; therefore it is a problem sufficient for me to rant about.
Walking collisions are a display of sheer stupidity. This is best illustrated by analyzing the moment immediately preceding impact. At that instance your consciousness grinds to a halt, presence of mind is replaced by panic. Reflexes slow to molasses; you feel like you do when trying to balance yourself on a curb, and, recognizing that you are slowly falling off, you cannot seem to rectify the situation. You lean left and then right, but to no avail.
Luckily, impact in walking collisions typically occurs at low speeds, thereby cutting down on injuries, but making things quite awkward. This is especially true if it is an opposite sex collision. It has been scientifically proven by fraternity scientists that most male college freshmen get their action by "accidentally" walking into people and then groping around for a better sense of "balance."
With the recent arrival of cold weather at Tufts, walking collisions have become more common, as people bundled up in nuclear protective coats with vision-impairing hats bump into that weird guy who insists on wearing shorts into January. Cold weather walking collisions also carry an extra threat: static shock. This past week we had an extremely dry air mass in place over campus, thus making conditions perfect for static shocks. I had the misfortune to get a static shock on my right butt cheek as I sat down in history class. While that sensation may have been oddly pleasant, there is always the threat of a destructive high voltage person-to-person static shock during a walking collision.
The panic of a walking collision is unique. Panic comes in many forms; for example, the walking-collision strain is far removed from the panic that a doomed airline passenger is stricken with, or the panic suffered by someone whose career has completely tanked, such as the actor Steve Guttenberg.
Walking-collision-induced panic is a laughable type of panic. It is best equated with the bristling sensation everyone has experienced when leaning back too far in a chair. The two essential ingredients that the walking-collision panic brew are danger and stupidity. Falling off a chair during a lecture is stupid, but it is also dangerous. Millions die every year from such chair-related injuries, at least according to a statistical source that I completely made up.
The proliferation of college students on college campuses has transformed a walk across the quad into a lesson in traffic management. The failure of most people to steer clear of others has resulted in a significant reduction of the comfort level of many students. Tufts' Ears for Peers help line has been flooded with phone calls by students who are afraid to walk around campus. "I am scared to walk to class. I might bump into someone again. My shoulder is still bruised from yesterday's journey to the cafeteria," one student reportedly said. "I came around the corner of Eaton and then... oh... it was just awful," another student lamented.
The need for walking safety legislation has recently gained momentum after the tragic beheading of one MIT student by what was described as "another MIT student who was humming the Pythagorean Theorem."
This event offers a valuable case study of walking collisions. The National Transportation Safety Board's (NTSB) report on the incident fails to provide concrete answers, but it does shed insight into the final thoughts of the victim. To come to think of it, that is all the NTSB reports are really good for anyway: enabling the people who were not involved in the accident to say, "Damn, that must have sucked. I can only imagine what that must have been like. Well, time to watch some TV." Anyway, the data recorder from the academic quad on that fateful day divulges the following:
Student 1: "A squared plus B squared equals C squared, bop shubop, shamma-lamma-ding-dong, squared, fared, bared, dared, cared, A squared plus B squared equals C squared, yah, who's your daddy?"
Student 2: "That guy is coming right at me. Maybe if I go this way..."
Student 1: "A squared plus B squared equals the base. Wait a minute, that doesn't work. Dammit! What the [expletive deleted]? Oh my God!"
[Sound of impact... Crunch!]
[Sound of beheading]
Despite the slow speeds involved at the moment of impact, the mathematically inclined student's backpack - filled with a calculus textbook, a linear algebra textbook, and a steel statue of Stephen Hawking - slid off of his shoulders and knocked the victim's neck off balance. According to the report, the two students saw each other from 2.5 miles away. Their failure to come to an amicable passing agreement demonstrates the sorry walking skills of college students today.
What does this say about negotiations in the Middle East? What does this bode for the Walk for Hunger? Should college students be banned from such charitable events? I think so. Most of all, what message does the failure to walk without collisions send to the children? Think of the children!
The theory that I postulate here is that people lack the cognitive skills to enable them to avoid walking into each other. I propose that, because humans have only recently (in geologic time) begun living in densely populated areas, the genetic code has yet to conform to the challenges posed by walking. Humans have just not adapted to the modern walking reality.
The realization that you are going to cross paths with someone else is not accompanied by the logical thought of "I better get out of the way." Instead it is cruelly mated with the unproductive thought: "I think I might hit that person. Maybe if I go this way... no, what about that way.... No..." [Sound of impact]. Either we wait for survival of the fittest to take over, or we investigate the only other possibility: we are composed of magnets instead of water. This theory explains why I seem to repel women, so it holds some promise. Regardless of the cause, it is clear that we need collision avoidance systems like the ones on airplanes. The government should mandate that all walkers are equipped with collision avoidance systems. Otherwise, in the words of whoever said it, "These boots are not made for walking." The police should also get involved and start citing people for CWW, "Colliding While Walking."
Adapted from sixdegrees.com
