How to behave yourself in the IC

As the dreaded exam season approaches, the Information Commons is becoming more and more like a bad spin off of The Hunger Games: queues, aggression and people fighting to the death for their favourite seat on Level 3.

Pull yourselves together, this is how to do it.

Revolving doors

You’ve arrived at the IC only half an hour later than you’d planned the night before and you’re feeling pretty chuffed with yourself.

Feeling overly optimistic about your proximate productivity, you pay no attention to how to actually enter the building.

Leaping into the first compartment that awaits, you barely notice it already has an occupant. You have just ruined that person’s day.

The booths are small – they barely hold you and your over-stuffed rucksack – don’t invade a fellow student’s personal space. It’s common decency.

Minefield

Scanning

You’ve overcome the biggest hurdle between you and your inevitable industry – you’re in the door. You expect plain sailing from here.

Approaching the stiles as nonchalantly as Madonna removes her capes, you arrive only to stare, nonplussed, at the obstacle you’re faced with. Eventually realisation dawns and you search around in your bag for your uCard while a queue of impatient students forms behind you and, flustered, you finally produce the goods and gain entry.

Have your uCard ready to scan or risk the scorn of the atrium.

Mess

Lifts

After all the stresses you’ve had to deal with, you decide you can’t be arsed with climbing the stairs to get to level 2, so you jump in a lift and ask the kind man next to the buttons to hit 2 for you, immediately pissing off everybody in there.

The IC lifts are notoriously slow and should thus only be used for trips between ground and level 4 – prepare yourself for some serious eye-rolling from your lift buddies, you won’t be able to miss them thanks to the all-round mirrors.

Get out and walk to 2 and think about what you’ve done.

What kind of monster

Silent study

You’re finally ready to embrace your destined diligence, you grab a seat in silent study and see a mate a few desks down, so naturally you wander over for a chin-wag. Better still, why not chat from your own respective seats, that way neither one of you has to move.

You’re a terrible person. Don’t talk, don’t eat, don’t breathe.

Take that shit to the chaos of FlexiSpace.

Anarchy

Computers

You couldn’t find a place to work but conveniently one of the computers on level 4 is free, so you saunter over and unpack all your stuff, opening up your laptop to begin the work that you’re so desperate by this stage to begin.

Using your laptop in front of a computer is the sort of thing that Alanis Morissette would mislabel ironic, and it’s almost as annoying as her tendency to do so.

Don’t block up valuable computer spaces, double screening is unforgivable.

One computer per desk isn’t a hard rule to stick by

Snack time

Been hard at work for a solid twenty minutes? You’ve earned yourself a lunch break. Nip downstairs to the IC café and find yourself faced with their wall of uninspiring meal deals. You and “um” and “ah” between the extravagance of a spicy beef and mozzarella panini or the hearty practicality of a big breakfast sandwich.

Before you know it, the most frenzied hypoglycaemics are pushing you down and stampeding over you like a muster of middle aged mums at the 50 Shades premiere.

Decide what you want before you get there, your lunch break isn’t an excuse to further procrastinate – you’re there to get in, get fed, and get out. Stop dicking around.