Tufts Blogs

Think back to your lunch the first day back from summer vacation in elementary school. You’re just getting accustomed to your new schedule, new classes, and most importantly, a new lunch period. As you pick up your tray of something hopefully resembling real food, you glance around the cafeteria hoping to find your friends who you could’ve sworn were here a second ago.

Now instead of elementary school, substitute Carm at dinner time and now you understand the conundrum faced by hundreds of uphill diners every day.

“But Fred!” , you may ask, “Why wouldn’t you just text your friends beforehand and figure out where they are BEFORE you go?”

Well, in an ideal world, you would message your friends and they’d immediately respond with a clear unambiguous location. But what exactly does “I have a table on the left” actually mean? Everything is relative anyway.

In response to this, I’d like to pass on another identification system for finding seating at Carm.

Ok so, here’s the general seat layout in Carm (apologies for the drawing and the spelling of “dishs [sic] because apparently there’s no digital version on the internet and Microsoft paint is not really a great tool):

And here’s a map of the United States: 

And when you overlay them you get this:

So, if you’ve got a table by the windows in the greenhouse looking area towards the top (see the X), you can say “I’ve got a table in Maine”. If you’re sitting near the bottom, where the square is, you could say “I’m in Texas”.

Not only is it a geography review, it’s a slightly less ambiguous than anything else I’ve seen.