April 21 , 2006

One day at MC... without an ID card

By AMY BITELY
arb001@marietta.edu

Food. Shelter.  Warmth. These are the common denominators of human comfort, and they have been from the dawn of time.  From the first, frenzied showdown between man and mammoth, the attempt to acquire creature comforts has defined the human race to such an extent that today, access to the good things in life is granted by one small piece of plastic: the ID card.

Unfortunately, this is a very small piece of plastic that can easily get lost.  Lost cards, unlike broken cards, cost ten dollars to replace, and so students who'd rather not go back to caveman days to get food, shelter, and warmth will often pay the ten dollars almost immediately.

This situation raises the question--is it possible to survive on campus without an ID card?  For long enough to find it again?  Therefore, I determined to spend one day in just that situation.
At a little before eight in the morning, I stepped out the door of my dormitory and heard the automatic lock click into place behind me. I had officially left my shelter behind; I was entering the world as a cardless individual.

The first problem, naturally, was breakfast. ID cards are also called “meal cards” by some students because, without swiping that piece of plastic through the machines at Izzy’s, Gilman, or Gilman Express, getting food costs cash--and it would be silly of me to assume that a college student had something like cash in his or her pockets.

Instead, I foraged in the various campus lounges, and eventually I turned up a handful of miniature doughnut and some cold coffee. It wasn’t bacon and eggs by a long shot, but it filled me up and gave me the energy to return to class.

Lunch became more problematic. I had the idea of picking some of the wild onions that grow on campus and then frying them up for stir fry, but every time I tried to pull up a wild onion, the stalk broke off. I was getting very little in the way of food, and my hands smelled like onions, so I gave up. More miniature doughnut and cold coffee soothed my empty belly.
The fried-chicken smells wafting over from Gilman were getting pretty tempting.

By dinnertime, I was ready to try the wild onions again, and when I found myself next to the library with great, big clumps of green stalks in the flowerboxes, I didn’t think twice--I just pulled up as many as I could carry and brought them back to my dorm.

Getting into my dorm became problematic, because ID cards are “key cards” in addition to “meal cards”--in short, I can’t get in without scaling a window or waiting for someone else to let me in. Fortunately, a friend had her card, so she let us both in at once.

Once inside, my peer partner Phebe informed me that I hadn’t pulled up wild onions at all. For one thing, they didn’t actually smell like onions, and I suspect I should have been aware of this long before I started getting my stir fry supplies together. Phebe took pity on me and let me have some of her
watermelon, along with an apple and a tangerine.

Later, still hungry even after my mercy-feeding, I wandered into the kitchen where two international students (Airin and Joy) were cooking a microwave noodle meal, and before I could begin to beg them for food, they offered me a few forkfuls of noodles. Perhaps they saw the hungry look in my eyes, or perhaps they were just naturally generous.

After replanting the not-onion plants in front of the library, I called it an early night and returned to my dorm, where my roommate let me in. I was tired, hungry, and had barely been home all day. On the other hand, I was more or less all right.
When we lose our ID cards, we don’t immediately enter a primitive man-versus-mammoth state in which we have to hunt with spears and build shelters out of sticks to survive. The ID card is certainly the easiest way to acquire food, shelter, and warmth, but it’s certainly not the only way. Paying cash for food is an option; so is harvesting the wild edible plants on campus (just be sure that you’re picking wild onions, not crocuses or daffodils or pine trees).

The best option for people missing cards, though, is networking. Friends, acquaintances, and even complete strangers will often let others into the dormitories without taunting them mercilessly for missing cards-there are phone boxes located at almost every dormitory door for just that purpose. Frequently, friends will also provide food to those who can’t get it themselves, sometimes even without being asked.

As I finished my experiment, I understood that it wasn’t necessarily important to replace the missing ID card right away-in fact, students could easily wait at least a day and use that time to look for the missing card. This would mean, among other things, not spending ten dollars to replace a card that shows up again in yesterday’s pair of pants. A student with a solid network of friends will not suffer too much for the experience.

For those students without friends, there aren’t any mammoths to hunt on campus, but there sure are a lot of squirrels . . .