<p>Imagine being a high school kid on your college tour with your parents, and just as you are taking a look at Harvard the president of the university resigns and the national press descends:</p>
<p>Gracious. The most excitement we ever had on a tour was when one of the prospects stepped on a mouse.</p>
<p>The Mice certainly are not going to find the Ulitimate Question at Harvard.</p>
<p>A chipmunk ran through our math class when we visited Williams. I'm glad to see rodents thinking beyond their next meals.</p>
<p>Not as big a deal, but we toured UNC the day/evening Roy Williams was appointed coach. Lots of media coverage as hoops are HUGE at UNC.</p>
<p>This might make an interesting ride at Epcot Center.</p>
<p>"Puddle of Pee" would be a good one, too.</p>
<p>"A chipmunk ran through our math class when we visited Williams."</p>
<p>That was Morty. ;)</p>
<p>I gave tours during the period when Massachusetts Hall was "occupied" by living wage protestors; I thought it added a lot to the tour to talk about that. The theme of the tour was always Harvard as living, breathing school, not museum, so it actually made it easier to get that point across.</p>
<p>Resignation's a little different, of course. But tour guides who give it a little preparation may find that it helps them bring Harvard down to human scale.</p>
<p>A friend of mine showed up in Boston to visit Harvard the only day of the year one CANNOT get into the yard: Graduation day. </p>
<p>I drove him AROUND the campus.</p>
<p>I visited the ER at Ben Taub Hosp in Houston as part of a med school interview the one day in it's entire history that it was fully staffed but closed to patients - Carter and Ford were having a presidential debate in Houston, and the ER was on stand-by in case one of them got shot.</p>
<p>We were about to enter the library on a tour of Colgate when the blackout of 2003 hit. As library personnel scurried out the doors like rats from a sinking ship, the tour just sort of broke up, no one knowing what was going on (and with the possibility of some kind of an attack on the US lurking in everyone's mind). </p>
<p>We spent a very strange night in the Catskills, in a world with no power. We finally found a motel that was open, albeit without power, water, or air-conditioning. Being seasoned campers, however, we could handle all of of that deprivation -- the tough part was listening all night to a next-door neighbor making sound effects that might have come out of "Psycho." I'm afraid to say that poor Vassar, which was on the agenda for the morrow, paid the penalty for our night in the twilight zone -- it was rather hard to appreciate its qualities after spending a night imagining (and preparing for) all the possible sequelae to the noises emanating from the room next door.</p>