Blog #2 An Act of Disruption

Vancouver Island University located on; you guessed it, Vancouver Island, which is an island off the West Coast of Canada with an estimated population of 700,000 people. The Campus in Nanaimo has over 18,000 domestic and international students. One of the most popular spots on Campus is the upper cafeteria, not to be mistaken with the lower cafeteria; a place students say reminds them of an abandoned mental hospital. No, the upper cafeteria with its puke green walls and twenty-year-old tables and chairs reminds people of what they’d imagine a prison cafeteria would look like. Students go to the cafeteria to eat food, study, and hang out with friends etc. 

Late Wednesday morning and the upper cafeteria is quiet, with perhaps two or three dozen people dispersed across the entirety of the cafeteria. At one of the corner tables on the main floor of the cafeteria is a young black man wearing a white hoody and a red baseball cap, presumably a VIU student. He sits by himself surrounded by a wall of his belongings, which take up two or three seats. Wearing a large set of headphones, he busily works on his laptop while at the same time eating what appear to be french fries. From the expression on his face and the urgency with which he’s typing, it seems he’s engaged in reasonably significant activity, possibly a last-minute school assignment or some other important work. Suddenly he throws his hands up and slams down the lid of his laptop, pulls off his headphones, gathers his stuff and heads for the door. Judging from behaviour; I surmise that he was running late for a class or an appointment.

I can picture him sitting calmly in a dentist’s waiting room, his goods and chattels stacked neatly in a chair beside him and his cap and jacket on the coat rack. His ever-present laptop is open and on his lap, but the urgency which we had observed in the cafeteria has disappeared.  From time to time, he looks up from his laptop and smiles at or nods to his fellow patients who are also waiting to be called. While some of the other patients deem to be slightly nervous with the impending procedure, our young man is calm and composed. A dentist’s office is neither a place to lose one’s composure nor to express frustration.

Often the setting makes a huge difference in the behaviour of the people who are in that setting. People adapt themselves to environments as society usually has different expectations for behaviours dependent on the place, time, or circumstance. We, as humans, are merely playing the roles that society expects from us when people step outside of societal expectations that predicate one’s behaviour. That is when you can cause an act of disruption. Said disruption can cause distress on the part of the observer or others who are occupying shared spaces.