For some reason, I am giving John and Jennifer a tour of the Engineering Center on the University’s main campus. I started out saying, as we walked down the first set of stairs by the main entrance, “I know these corridors are confusing, but I know them very well since that I spent so much time here.” And yet, I know that they are doing construction, so there would be some things changed since I had last navigated the halls.
As we are checking out the lower-level courtyards, I lead our little group toward “the moat” – the area that surrounds the Engineering Center below the main floor. When we get to the front I see that they are filling up the moat and I need to adjust course. We take a metal door to a stairwell that brings us up into the building proper. The glass windows look out over the scaffolding and construction equipment filling in the moat.
We’re now in the labs area, which is the most confusing part of the maze. We take a sideways elevator to another building segment (I feel like I should have walked, but this is faster…) and take a set of stairs up only to reach a stairwell further down. I’m committed to showing them the building from the bottom up, since the tower itself is not that interesting in terms of its maze-like architecture.
Finally, we reach the bottom level, and there is a huge cavern containing a bunch of buildings. They are all variations on Albertsons – even Safeway is there. I’m not surprised to see this here, and John and Jennifer don’t seem to be confused by this (especially not the Albertsons/Safeway bit – they’re more up to speed on these things than I am). We easily navigate around all the grocery stores and out to the exit of this section of the cavern.
As we exit, there’s a passage that leads out beyond the edge of a cliff. It’s wide enough that it doesn’t seem dangerous, so we walk out over the chasm. There’s a hole at the end with what looks like a basketball net attached and there’s a man standing there. He explains that the hole will take us to heaven or hell when we jump through it. I am somehow haggling with him over this, explaining that I’m faculty and that these are my guests – can’t I take this hole back to the entrance to the Engineering Center? It seems that this may be possible, but it’s at this point that I wake up…