The Labyrinth of Room Numbers

August 31, 2025

There’s a special kind of happiness that only a college corridor can provide, and it starts the moment you decide to find your classroom armed with nothing but optimism, a leaky pen, and the naïve belief that room numbers follow a linear sequence. You step onto campus feeling heroic, like Theseus entering the labyrinth, except your thread is a screenshot of last semester’s timetable, your Minotaur is the admin clerk who sighs in Roman numerals, and your guiding oracle is a WhatsApp group where five different people insist class is both “definitely on” and “definitely off” at the same time.

The pilgrimage usually begins at the noticeboard, a vertical museum of yesterday’s announcements, taut string, and pushpins that have tenure. The official timetable is pinned at a rakish angle and appears to have been designed by someone who admires both the density of neutron stars and the aesthetics of a crossword puzzle. Your batch appears under “B.A. (Hons.)” and again under “BAH,” then once more under “BA (H)” because consistency is for the sciences.

You trace columns with your index finger like an archaeologist decoding a fragment of clay, mumbling time slots that jump from 8:45 to 10:10 with suspicious gaps where mortal classes should be. A small Post-it, written in a shade of ink that exists only to fade, announces that “ENG-204 has been moved to the 3rd floor, new wing.” Which wing? No one knows, but a helpful stranger points “that way,” which turns out to be the cafeteria, where every great academic quest briefly pauses for samosas and borrowed ketchup.

The corridors are a choose-your-own-adventure novel with stairs that lead to landings that lead to more stairs that lead to rooms that begin at 201, then jump to 205, and then, because the architect clearly had an avant-garde phase, to 205A, which is actually a broom closet. You pass a classroom labelled 3C, then another labelled C3, and you accept that one of these is a matrix and the other a prank.

Meanwhile, the WhatsApp oracles are at war again: rumor gallops through the halls that the professor’s car’s tire is flat, that the professor’s cat is sick, that the professor’s flat is sick with cats, and also that “it’s Teacher’s Day somewhere,” therefore class is probably cancelled. A senior, seasoned by years of academic scavenger hunts, announces confidently that today “all ENG-204s are in the seminar hall,” which sounds authoritative until you realize the seminar hall is booked for a blood drive and a surprisingly upbeat debate on whether attendance is a social construct.

You power-walk. The backpack slaps your spine with the rhythm of a drumline audition, and your water bottle performs its own percussion. You try the elevator, which, out of respect for tradition, stops at every floor except the one you need. You sprint past the courtyard where someone is doing yoga while discussing existentialism loud enough to make you briefly consider switching majors to breathing. On the second floor you collide with a human river of students carrying chart paper, which is how you learn that architecture students migrate seasonally from studio to studio, guided only by the wind and the smell of adhesives.

A campus cat regards your haste with aristocratic disdain, then leads you to a sunlit corridor and disappears through a mysteriously important faculty door that you will never be cool enough to use.

You finally find a door marked 304: ENG-204, printed in a typeface that suggests the printer was seizing, but functional enough to make your heart soar. You slip in with the humility of a pilgrim who has glimpsed the holy of holies: rows of chairs, a bored ceiling fan that could testify in court, and a whiteboard still bearing the ghost of last year’s syntax trees. A cluster of familiar faces turns to you; everyone looks relieved and slightly surprised, like you all survived a group escape room accidentally. There is a moment of silence, and then, like a miracle, the professor enters—except it’s not your professor. It’s a different professor with the noble posture of someone who’s been told they are in 304 and who believes it with the certainty of gravity.

You check the noticeboard photo again and discover the final twist: someone had added a tiny caret and a scribbled “B” to 304 at some point, turning it into 304B, which is apparently a different room entirely and also located in a different universe behind a wooden partition you mistook for an art installation. You stand, you smile, you nod at the strangers who are now your temporary tribe, and you back out as their class begins a spirited discussion on Byzantine agriculture or Aeronautical Thermodynamics or Advanced Accounting for Entities That Exist Only On Paper, while your course, which was allegedly moved, cancelled, and resurrected, is currently happening somewhere very near, or very far, or possibly inside a pocket dimension where attendance is still being taken.

On your way out, you pass another noticeboard with a fresh sheet taped diagonally: “Due to unforeseen circumstances, ENG-204 venue changed to 208 (Old Wing).” Of course it has. You begin the trek again, feeling oddly jubilant. There’s a lightness in the chase, a camaraderie in the shared confusion, and a zing in overheard gossip that is ninety percent fiction and ten percent prophecy. You meet four new people, learn three alternative pronunciations of the same professor’s name, and discover a shortcut through the library that smells like old paper and rain. You are, in a very literal and ridiculous sense, in pursuit of learning, and the pursuit is the funniest part.

Inevitably, you burst into 208 (Old Wing), hair heroically chaotic, lungs narrating a protest, and the class inside turns as one organism to greet your dramatic entrance. It is, naturally, the wrong classroom again—Intro to Comparative Mythology, which only makes sense, because this whole expedition has been a mythic cycle with you as the frazzled hero, the noticeboard as your unreliable oracle, and the timetable as a trickster god. You apologize, grin, and promise yourself you’ll sit in on Mythology next week, because if this adventure has taught you anything, it’s that the best classes you attend might be the ones you never meant to find.