Man, I thought the real world was replete with jerks. I forgot what a petri dish ISU is for the behaviorally challenged.

No matter where I go, there is always some jagoff making the most of the extended childhood this environment affords its citizenry. Combine this with the complete lack of human kindness typical of an upwardly-mobile member of the middle class and the kind of sexual tension you usually find only in British boarding schools and LOOK OUT!

I never thought anyplace could make me long for the friendliness of the Omaha/Council Bluffs metro area.

I hadn’t been here for two weeks before I was nailed by some reprobate riding his bike on the sidewalk at grand prix speeds. I think he was trying to go back in time he was booking so fast. Short of laying face down in a mudhole (which I refuse to do for anything smaller than a Panzer), I could do nothing to defend myself.

I could hear the high-pitched whine of his tires on the sidewalk so I knew he was going fast. He was weaving around pedestrians like Christian Slater at a bachelor party, no regard for human life, no care for the women.

He nailed me right in the hand with his handlebar; hurt like hell, too. The thing that got me more than anything was that this guy didn’t even bother to survey the damage or shout an insincere “sorry” as he sped away; probably hoping to avoid a first class ass-kicking — good call, pal! He must have assumed from my volley of profanity that I wasn’t dead, and it was therefore okay to run like hell. I should probably count myself lucky he didn’t flip me off or come back and try to pull a Ned Beatty on me, the dirty, little bastard.

Take a good look at the picture next to this column. Hi, there! If you ever see me on campus, take your bike off-road because the next time I get nailed by some punk who thinks the sidewalk is his own personal interstate system, I will hunt you down and see how many parts of your bike will fit inside of you.

To truly understand the depths of the mind-numbing stupidity on campus, you have to hang out at the appeals desk in the parking systems office. No, this is not going to turn into another rant about parking Nazis, that’s been done.

Personally, I have never been too concerned with the parking systems enforcement on campus. I don’t usually try to park illegally, but if I do decide to take my chances and play the scofflaw, I pay my fine and don’t complain; it’s like gambling.

Occasionally, though, in spite of the clearly displayed hang-tag on my mirror, I get a ticket for parking in the lot I paid $17 to park in legally because the drone in charge of cruising my lot got all excited about not seeing a sticker and started writing like Stephen King on crystal meth. Then I get my written appeal reduced to “improperly displayed” because I wasn’t polite enough about getting screwed like a ten dollar hooker when I wrote it.

Then I have to waste my time and kiss ass just to get someone to reconsider their erroneous mistake. When they finally dismiss the ticket that shouldn’t have been written in the first place, they make it sound like they did me a huge freaking favor because, according to them, I should have made sure it was clearly visible.

I know! How about from now until the end of time, I stand beside my car holding a sign that says “Check for an official DPS hang-tag, Helen Keller!” Just in the extremely unlikely event that the “officer” writing the tickets in my lot that day is not a highly trained observer but is really just some pimply-faced freshman with the attention span of a fruitfly.

What do you know, this turned out to be rant!

In spite of my ire, I have no sympathy for the people who have the chutzpah to blatantly disregard the rules and then complain about getting caught. Quite frankly, if you’re dumb enough to leave your car out behind the Durham Center in the “no parking” zone with your blinkers on, then not only should you get a ticket, you should be placed in stocks and be paraded around campus on a wagon while the rest of us who walk the two blocks to campus throw rotten vegetables at you.

Truth be told, I used to work in the appeals office a few years ago, and I have an insider’s perspective. First off, the job sucks. There is an endless flood of tickets to be dealt with followed by the inevitable lines of angry, annoying, irrational dingleberries who think their ticket should be torn up because of some technicality.

One time, I had this guy come in, must have been a philosophy major because he thought that he could debate this ticket out of existence using pure logic. He didn’t deny parking illegally, but he wanted his ticket torn up because it said his car was grey when it was “obviously silver.”

He would not let that dog lie, either. He must have argued with me for twenty minutes. When he left, he was livid.

So of course he got a ticket for parking in the DPS lot illegally. I have never felt closer to getting shot in my life, but it might have been worth it for the laugh I got out of that one.

The good news was that if you were a professor or an administrator, you could usually get your tickets torn up just by chatting with the boss, but I am sure that doesn’t go on any more.

But God must love jerks because they do seem to prosper and flourish. I think this subject may be too varied to be covered in one shot.

Luckily for me there are enough wankers out there to keep us all in stories well into the millennium.

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Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs.