Note: This post is not meant to make light of the suffering of students injured or traumatized by the events that occurred on the UC Berkeley campus on Monday, nor is it meant to trivialize the explosion and its aftermath.
Yesterday was a pretty crazy day for students at UC Berkeley. On Monday evening, the campus was evacuated in response to an explosion near California Hall.
As if the national government’s shutdown and the on-campus explosion weren’t enough, students also had to deal with a consequent loss of wi-fi and power at many locations around Berkeley. Desperate students turned dormitory hallways into makeshift libraries, capitalizing on the fact that the common areas were lit. In short, conditions were near-apocalyptic.
It was only a matter of hours before the Internet exploded with memes, tweets and posts responding to the literal explosion. Here are some of our favorites.
Students didn’t let the power outage distract them from the important things …
like coffee…

Remember, it’s a double.
or lecture.
This picture received more than 600,000 views.

Concert or class?
Some people were worried …
Some were more blase …
Some students had their own interpretation of what was going on …
And others tried to capitalize on the situation.
Or bought this shirt:
Berkeley students, we’re always so forward-thinking:
But then, the bigger picture started to emerge:
Typical Berkeley: