Screw This


The Daily Targum
By James O’Keefe
Published: 12/8/2003

This goes out to all the Rutgers students who have been screwed like a 60-watt light bulb, like a demented organ grinder, like a lug nut off a flat tire. This goes out to the innocent first-year scholars who experience more bureaucracy here than the DMV on Monday morning, more red tape than a Kmart on Christmas. This goes out to all those who finally have adapted to things such as bus and registration paradigms that are as inefficient and cumbersome as square snails.But as you might know, it's not just the clichéd RU Screw that can fill you with more rage than a lion in heat. It's the small things - the silly things - the little moments comprising your everyday routine that torment you. Things that administrators and the public could never understand. I've held my pride in for too long. Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, which gets its satisfaction from surprising me with an array of vexations from its bureaucratic bag of antics, will now feel my wrath.This goes out to all those people who despite their last-minute sprinting, will always miss that A, EE or LX, by 15 seconds, no matter what the time, place or situation. They will watch that bus, operating on arbitrary time intervals, merrily accelerate onward just past their reach. Those faint green letters on the rear will mock their disappointment, and they will think what could have been if only they had taken the stairs instead of waiting those precious seconds for that malfunctioning elevator.This goes out to all those people who think those "handicapped" doors in front of the computer lab on College Ave. just don't make any sense. Like others around campus, I have never seen them work properly, and once I saw them close on a helpless man who was actually in his wheelchair pushing that ridiculous blue switch. You are obliged to open them manually, requiring more strength than if they were just regular doors. Uncanny.Maybe laxatives aren't in the food at Brower. Perhaps, like the "Captain Commons" faculty person exclaims on posted napkins, (notice the goofy, super-hero-like terminology), it is the juice we drink, not the glop we consume, that makes us jet for the lavatories. But how are we supposed to drink all this juice when those funky, slow machines are always spitting out diluted water? Regardless of the mysterious source of one's digestive stimulation, how are we supposed to relieve ourselves when the dorm bathrooms are being cleaned at the most inopportune times, leaving us desperately darting around the dorm floors frantically searching for toilets like squirrels.Then there are those brown paper towel dispensing devices in the bathrooms that also makes less sense than the story line of "Dude, Where's My Car?" They are always empty, and if they aren't empty, the towels get stuck coming out. The completely modernized bathrooms are void of the more clean, reliable, and environmentally friendly hand dryers. The dirty, old bathrooms are filled with them. If there are infrared heat-sensing laser beams on toilet stalls that automatically flush for you, why can't they have hand dryers that just blow warm air?This goes out to all those students who lined up and waited patiently his or her turn to sell all those expensive, seldom-used books you bought with irrelevant material not on your exams. It's your turn, the moment of truth. You encounter the book nazi who screams, "These books are no good! No buyback for you!" You tilt your head in shame, stuck with those worthless hundred-dollar investments. You reflect on the candor, the brutal mercilessness of the book nazi who shot your high economic spirits down like a clay pigeon in the sky; whipped you like the four-eyed kid in the schoolyard!And what is with all the pornography? From chairs in the lecture halls to the desks in Alexander library. Kudos to anyone who can concentrate on studying with penises and vaginas sprawling every inch of your workspace.What is with those dreary looking students checking your backpack when you leave the library? What purpose does this serve? Do they even care what's inside? All that is required of me is that I wave my backpack around giving the illusion that they are checking it! Same thing with the buffoonery of writing down guest's names when they enter dorms ... for only five hours out of the day! The only time they've checked my key is when I've offered to show it to them! Will someone please show me the administrative geniuses who come up with these foolproof ideas for my safety?The Hurtado Health Center seems to be more of an assembly line, an illusion of caring, another bureaucratic requisite than anything actually useful for the protection of my health. It took them a year to remove that "Immunization Hold" from my transcript, even after I sent them letter upon letter verifying what they wanted. Those exclamation points online made me feel more like a rabid tiger at a circus than a student at a university.And those lottery numbers. They claim they're random, but I tell you they are cursed, perhaps staged. It seems only the previously fortunate go to the exact room with the exact person they want, while those who were in tripled dorm rooms, or moved around campus like pawns on a chess board, get screwed. How equitable.This goes out to all the victims who've had mailbox partners who haven't checked their mail in six months, giving you a tiny stuffed box filled with his outdated newsletters that you must constantly sort through every week. Yet this itself is a daunting task, considering you must carefully remove letters without them falling into the abyss on the opposite side. That is - if you can actually open those puny doors with the outdated combination mechanisms.This goes out to the Rutgers students who are changing their minor simply because it is so challenging to get in the appropriate classes, dealing with departments that can't figure out what requirements they want for the major, programs with ambiguous rules for admission, smelly old men hogging televisions in the Red Lion Café and cars that are magnets for parking tickets.But we must understand Rutgers is a state of mind, our distinguishing collegiate privilege, and a piece of cake for what's to come in our lives. However frustrating all of this nonsense seems, however loud the laughs coming from gravesite of bureaucratic theorist Max Weber are, we must remind ourselves not to retreat, not to go quietly into the night. We must use bigger scissors when encountering red tape, perhaps listen to the inspirational "Chariots of Fire" as we run faster to those buses, and write columns in The Daily Targum commenting on all that insanity abundant with odd similes stranger than a gang of drunken mimes.

NJO: Originally appeared in Rutgers University's newspaper The Daily Targum, later posted on the blog Feathers of Steel at liberabit.blogspot.com.