If Ohio University were an Alfred Hitchcock movie, it would be called The Bricks.
Just like the evil avian creatures, our little 8x4x3-inch friends seem innocent, but secretly they conspire to trip pedestrians and rattle mufflers and hubcaps off cars.
They've got us outnumbered and surrounded, too. Every building. Every walkway. Every wall. Everywhere I look, I see bricks. I see bricks when I close my eyes. The OU campus has more bricks than Shaquille O'Neal from about 10 feet out. They're inescapable.
I am convinced that the enormous south wall of the Radio and Television Arts Building is a giant brick Magic Eye picture, but I can't get a good perspective on it to do that fuzzy, unfocused thing with my eyes.
Surely, though, the pervasiveness of bricks at Ohio University is nothing newsworthy. The first bricks were here long before the first student, and if you ignore them, they just fade into the scenery.
But Monday, as I sat on a bench on College Green and gazed around at that scenery, a little voice inside me wondered, How many bricks are there at OU?
I told myself to ignore the voice, that to calculate that number would be impossible. It was too late, though. Soon my curiosity got the better of me, and I began counting.
Obviously, if I had continued counting one by one, I'd still be out there somewhere on campus, counting away. In order to speed things up, I developed a system of estimation, counting up and across on a building, multiplying and then estimating the number of bricks in buildings by their relative sizes.
Still, it was a tedious process. I stopped for lunch somewhere in the middle, and I remember my conversation with the girl behind the counter at the Corner Café going something like this:
Hi
welcome to brick. What can I brick you?
Uh yeah I'd like one brick with pepperoni and mushroom
a bag of bricks and one small Brick Dew.
Sure. Your total comes to brick dollars and brickety-five cents. (Pause). Here you brick. Your change is five twenty-brick. Have a good brick.
You too. Brick you. Brick you very much.
At that point, I had gone into an advanced stage of delirium, but I pressed on, estimating all the bricks I could find. It had become a quest.
I was much like the boy in the Tootsie Roll Pop commercial, but I sought to count bricks, not licks, and I had no wise old owl to answer my question. I called OU Facilities Management, but they had no answer readily available -Laurie Thomas, bless her heart, polled the department to see if anyone knew; she must have thought I was crazy.
I did prevail, however, and arrive at a final estimate, in which I included every campus building except The Ridges, HDL Center, HRTC and Riverpark. I counted every brick walkway or street touching campus and any other miscellaneous brick structures I came across. It was a lot like a colossal Guess the Number of Jelly Beans in the Jar contest at the fair, except with bricks, no jar, no fair and no prizes.
Anyway, pretend now that you can hear a drum roll. The grand total of bricks on campus according to my estimation is just over 16 million -enough to stretch from here to Sacramento if lined up end to end.
Certainly, one should consider several factors -my rough and haphazard estimation, my complete lack of authority as a mathematician and my obvious insanity -and assume a significant margin of error.
With that said, I'd like to see you do better. For now, 16 million it is. I hope this number brings you as much inner peace as it does me.
To the terra-cotta gods, I say, Brick you. Brick you very much.
-Joe Rominiecki is a senior journalism major. Send him an e-mail at andrew.rominiecki@ohiou.edu.
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Joe Rominiecki
