Nonsense and other miscellany - A long and ultimately pointless story from long ago

Current Music:	Tom Middleton - The Sound of the Cosmos
Subject:	A long and ultimately pointless story from long ago
Time:	09:08 pm

My sophomore year of college I was living with two fools, Gabernaut and

richandfamous, in a loft deep in the bowels of the Wallace dormitory. We engaged in a lot of foolishness, as was our nature, but the tale I am about to relate is the foolisherest of them all!

One day in November or so,

richandfamous and I were returning from some class or other, and in the hall outside of Macro (Macalester Recycling Organisation) there was a huge pile of boxes. Inside them were a whole ton of obsolete alumni directories. When we got home it emerged that Gabernaut had noticed them too. All kinds of great ideas rushed into our heads, and flush with excitement we liberated the boxes, er, by taking them.

I said there were a ton of boxes, but that was obviously only a figure of speech. There were actually just over 2 tons of boxes, once our friend who worked in Macro let us at the ones behind locked doors. The total volume of these 105 boxes or so was roughly equivalent to a breadbox the size of a Volkswagon Beetle. Gabernaut actually built a staircase out of boxes, to make it easier for him to get to his lofted area. Miraculously, this did not result in any sort of bodily injury.

The ideas we had were for clever pranks with the boxes. My favorite was to sneak them into the Student Union elevator late at night, glue them all together, and label them "Arms", "Legs", "Heads", &c. But between classes and slacking off, we didn't have time before vacation. Before we went back to our ancestral homes, we had to have our room inspected by the RA. So of course we hid the 1 VW worth of boxes. Under beds, in and over closets, instead of chairs, they were everywhere but in plain sight.

When we got back we continued to not bother executing on any of our prank plans. Eventually we got fed up with having our entire living space filled with all the boxes. Rather than get rid of them, though we figured we'd just stick them in an unused section of wall that we managed to gain access to. We enlisted the help of some friends under false pretenses ("come by! We're watching Star Wars!"), and started a box brigade.

Eventually some folks wandered by and asked what was going on; we told them we were moving someone in to the nook in the wall, what with the on campus housing shortage, and all. Unfortunately it turned out that this passer-by was an RA so soon we (by which I mean the Goster) were explaining ourselves to an RA an HA (hall adviser), and two security guards. Meanwhile Gabernaut, who was IN the walls, fled through the extensive network of steam tunnels which our Minnesota campus was riddled with.

After some doing, we managed to convinced The Man that we weren't really doing anything illegal or dangerous, just stupid. They let us into storage, and we moved all the boxes there. One week later, we got a phone call telling us that actually no they were wrong, and we can't store two tons of flammable material in the basement of a dormitory. We lured our easily fooled friends back with promises of Babylon 5, and moved all the boxes back to their original location.

The next day they were gone.

Two weeks after this, we got a phone call from Macro, who 'owned' them originally. They were calling to ask if we had them still, and to tell us they needed them back, due to the sensitive information they contained. Luckily they were no longer our problem, so we went about our foolish ways.

Though none of us ever fully learned it, I believe the moral of this story is: Don't be such a freaking dumbass!

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October 26th, 2004

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