It may not be as iconic as wearing an ID on a lanyard around your neck or telling people, with full sincerity, that you want to go to med school, but it’s a hallmark of the clueless first-year experience nonetheless.
And for the past month, it has been playing out with all the drama of a Shakespearean tragedy (written, anyone will tell you, while under quarantine.)
The Campus Times can confirm that a UR first-year who mistook the south-bound Blue Line for the College Town Express has now been stuck in the Whipple Park parking lot since in-person classes were cancelled on March 11. The first-year, Ursula Munds-Gurganus, had been buying Tide Pods at CVS and lunching at Chipotle for the third time in two days.
“I checked the bus app thing, y’know with the map?” Munds-Gurganus told CT via email, “but it said the Gold Line was in the middle of Lake Ontario and that the Orange Line would resume service in December of 3020, so I figured I would just get on the first familiar bus I saw. I mean, I ride the Blue Line down to College Town sometimes, right? Next thing I know we’re going past the med center, past Southside even, all the way to what looks like a weird summer camp in the middle of the woods. And I’ve been here ever since.”
Whipple Park, a housing complex for grad students that caters primarily to families with children, has long been the unintended destination for wayward first-years who think any moving vehicle they board will take them where they want to go. The complex has even dedicated one of its cedar-shingled townhouses to temporarily house lost UR undergrads.
When asked if she had taken advantage of this service, Munds-Gurganus told CT that she was “still finding her way around UR,” that “adjusting to college [wa]s a major life event,” and that she “deserve[d] a little more patience.”
When asked when the Blue Line and Munds-Gurganus could be expected to return to the Rush Rhees stop, UR Shuttles Director Rick Slick told the CT, “At this time we can confirm that the Blue Line shuttle in question, BL42069, is running on an abnormal timetable.”
It is unclear whether or not UR’s shutdown of all in-person classes is the cause of Munds-Gurganus’ marooning. The driver for BL42069, Brighton native Oscar Newton, did not respond to CT inquiry, though multiple co-workers told CT that he has always called the Blue Line stopover at Whipple Park “Oscar time.”
