Hamsters

I haven't updated for a while, so sorry to the three people who still look at my blog. The topic of today is how uneventful life is at Commuter Services lately. A parking enforcement officer's job depends on people parking badly. Usually, there are more bad parkers when there are more people on campus. It being summer semester, there are few students willing to study between the tortures of spring and fall. So now there are a few responsible students who park correctly as well as us employees who park in the same place every day.

Furthermore, while it seems like an officer is ready with a ticket whenever you stick a toe out of a parking line, we are actually so understaffed that at any given time there are only about 2 or 3 officers patrolling. (Now's a good time to be rebellious). We've also had an equipment crisis. We recently ordered new handheld computers to write tickets with, but we've had trouble programming them. Meanwhile, all of the old machines are dying. Last week, we couldn't even do things the old-fashioned hand-written way because we ran out of ticket books.

You'd think all this wouldn't affect me, since I've spent most of my time inside the dispatch office monitoring the radio and doing paperwork. The problem is that my job is to assist the officers by looking things up for them, so when the officers have nothing to do, I have even less to do. Fortunately, I have the good old world wide web to entertain me. So I'm going to enrich you with fascinating things I've learned while bored.

Let's talk hamsters. You're probably wondering why anyone would want to read about hamsters. This just shows the severity of my boredom. The weird thing about hamsters is that they are an endangered species in the wild. This is weird because hamsters are sexually mature six weeks after birth. Females go into heat every four days. They have a gestation period of only sixteen days and can give birth to up to eighteen young at a time. So how in the world could these breeding machines be endangered? It's a mystery.