Booked a controversial speaker for my campus event and ended up in a 3 hour debate with the administration about parking permits.

I invited a free speech activist to speak at our college and the dean was fine with it, but somehow the real controversy was whether we could reserve the auditorium without buying an extra parking pass for the speaker's van, has anyone else run into absurd bureaucratic barriers like this?

2 comments

2 Comments

martin.vera14d ago

...so my buddy over at a community college tried to host a panel on local zoning laws and the facilities office lost their minds because the guest speaker's car was a 1987 Ford van with a non-standard license plate frame. They spent three hours arguing about whether they needed a special permit for "oversized vehicles" even though it was just a regular old van. Ended up just parking it two blocks away and walking. Total waste of time, but the speaker actually got more attention from the whole parking fiasco than the actual event. Bureaucracy at its finest I guess.

alices1614d ago

Got halfway through planning my own event once, only to realize the biggest hurdle was whether the spare projector bulb counted as "hazardous materials" for the facilities team. Really makes you question who's running the show.