“…also do you have time for a quick call?”

Hawa and I had just got through talking about how someone had said to my face that my hair looked like a bush and laughed.

The person then said, “I thought you cared about your hair?” I was a little hurt since that person and I had just sat through a lecture in CSE 351 in which we discussed discrimination/bias in computing.

It felt as if I am not allowed to have long hair since I am black, especially since my hair is long enough to stick out yet not long enough for me to put in a pony tail. It is finals week afterall.

Little did I know, Hawa was about to tell me that while she was at the CSE building early in the morning (she had stayed up the whole night working extremely hard as all of us do in CSE) someone had called the police on her.

The officer had said that someone may have thought that she was possibly homeless.

Is the Allen School giving away free Data Structures and Algorithms textbooks to the homeless community? Perhaps someone in homeless community had solved the Traveling Salesman Problem and needed to quickly whiteboard their proof?

How could you possibly think that someone INSIDE the CSE building (card required!) very early in the morning, actively using a computer and whiteboard, was somehow trespassing/homeless?

Do you not have the decency to talk to a calm, studious individual to see what they were doing instead of calling the police?

I couldn’t answer this question. Perhaps this is an NP-Hard problem.

I am now searching for the future Turing Award winner on the Ave, since someone must have confused Hawa for this illusive genius.