Tab Tries: Navigating the UL

Are you looking for a great way to procrastinate that enables you to fool yourself into believing you’re doing work? Look no further than the circles of hell that constitute the UL (that rhymed, so it must be true).

If you are unfamiliar with the UL, you are either a scientist or you are yet to suffer an essay crisis that leads you to its overbearing gates. Picture the scene: you’re one day away from an essay deadline, and you suddenly realise you need one essential book to finish your work – but shock horror, it’s not in the college library or in the faculty or on Google Books.

You may at this point be tempted to throw yourself from the top of the UL tower, but have no fear: the UL can offer you support in another way (albeit it an excruciating one). That’s right, it’s time to be condemned to what feels like eternal torture, by attempting to navigate its diabolical labyrinth of bookshelves.

Even before you’re properly in the building, the UL’s fiendish nature is evident: if you have a bag bigger than one millimeter in diameter, you can forget about taking it in with you. Instead, you need to descend into its ungodly bowels and try to find a locker large enough to accommodate every possession you’re carrying.

Little shoutout here: if you are one of the people who steals the large lockers at 9.00am which you then don’t empty them until 7.15pm: we all hate you.

Once you’ve managed to tear your coat by stuffing it into a minuscule locker, it’s time to scan your card and ascend the steps – but unlike Led Zeppelin, you’re certainly not on a stairway to Heaven.

You may go into the UL with a small objective: you only want to find a couple of books and you know exactly where they are – you just know you’ll be out in ten minutes.

You fool.

You will, in fact, only have two thoughts as you wander helplessly around the UL:

And then there’s the whole rigmarole of the Dewey Decimal System, which the UL has seemingly made even more complex, if that were possible. You’ve got the number you’re looking for; you think you’re in the right area of the library…but where’s the damn book?

I’m almost certain there are demons who deliberately hide the precise copy you need each time you visit – the battery on my bike light actually died in the time it took for me to find the one I was looking for.

This, combined with the reading room that’s probably not unfamiliar to Beelzebub; and corridors that are so dark you’d think it was the middle of the night (let’s face it, it probably already is, considering the amount of time you’ve spent traipsing up four flights of staircases and then back down again, because you were supposed to go to the South WING, and not the South FRONT), make the whole UL experience ONE TO BE AVOIDED.

To top it all off, you’ll probably forget your locker code in the process, and be trapped in the UL forever.