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In This Issue

• Morningside Heights = Wormhole
• First Year Friendships are for Fakies
• Stupid Shit Last Year's Frosh Did
• Letters to and from the Feditrix
• Meet Columbia's Least Employable Grads
• Drunken Email: Sloshed Slacker Salvation
• A Well-Engineered SEAS Survival Guide
• Engineers Get Jobs, But never Blowjobs
• Thirty Things to Do Before you Graduate
• Tips for Keeping Your Room Tidy and Your Roommate Pissed Off
• Pass that Class with Your Hot Ass
• Attack of the Killer Barnard Blowjob
• Apathy is for Jerks, Imperialism is for Turks
• Student Spends Summer Choking Chickens
• Columbia is Folsom Prison All Over Again
• Get Laid Quick, or your Genitals will Melt
• CUicide: A Proud Tradition

By now you’ve probably encountered one of the biggest difficulties in meeting people during Orientation: thinking of something to talk about. “So um... that activity was dumb... uh... there was this guy at my highschool once... um... I guess you had to be there.” It’s hard to be interesting to strangers, because at age 18, you haven’t had much time to really differentiate yourself. But there’s one topic of conversation everyone can identify with: The Bad Summer Job story. So to get the discussion going, allow me to regail you with my brief forray into the world of Poultry Science. Gather round, children, it’s story time.

Back in the summer of ’99, between the tenth and eleventh grade, I was planning on spending my summer masturbating, playing video games, masturbating, contemplating my isolated, unpopular existence, and masturbating. Then one day my father said, "Get your lazy ass up and get dressed. I got you a job at the University."

Nevertheless, I was actually pretty excited when I showed up for my first day of work. "Ah," I thought to myself, "Gainful employment! Science! I’m really becoming an adult. What’s that smell?" My place of work was a warehouse at the back of the Department of Agricultural Engineering. I saw my coworkers, clad in orange jumpsuits, all standing around a small treadmill where 24 chickens were struggling to walk. What the hell?

I quickly caught on. The orange jumpsuits, a gift from the State Department of Corrections, were to prevent contact with chicken feces, a substance found in impressive abundance around the lab. We also wore elbow-length rubber gloves and shoe booties for the same purpose. And yes, we were actually walking chickens on a treadmill. Why? I’m still not sure. All I know is that Allison the grad student needed a PhD, and somehow by running the little birds on the conveyor belt, I was helping in that noble pursuit.

Each day, group by group, I’d put the birds into their compartments on the treadmill, flip the switch, and watch them run. Only, they didn’t really run. Chickens can’t grasp the concept of aerobic exercise, so instead of walking or running in place, they’d get this panicked expression, and brace themselves against the backs of their compartments as their feet slid along the rubber of the treadmill. This would keep up until a bird rolled over and got a wing caught in the machine. Then she (they were all female; the study began with a mass-slaughter of male chicks) would projectile-shit in fear before her wing would snap and blood would start gushing everywhere as she slowly bled to death. At this point, the only thing I could do was throw her into an open box and listen to pathetic flopping sounds until Eric, the other grad student, came by and expedited her death by snapping her neck. Ah , the beauty and majesty of Science!

It was my job to prevent this sort of carnage from occurring. The problem was there were twenty-four birds on the machine, all simultaneously losing ambulatory and bowel control. The only way to prevent a chicken from dying was to cradle its constantly defecating ass in my gloved hand, resulting in the prevention of only two gruesome poultry deaths at a time.

The best thing about the frequent deaths was that the job got progressively easier. Fewer birds meant less work and less cleanup. And if the natural selection of the treadmill wasn’t enough, every Friday we’d take a sample. This involved picking fifteen birds at random, stuffing them under a Rubbermaid container with a tube sticking out of the top, and gassing them Auschwitz style. "Say gutbie to your familee, birdie number tventy-zeven, too zee showers you go." Eric and Allison would then cart them off to the freezer to do God-knows-what with their little lifeless bodies.

Did any of this bother me on a moral level? No, not really. If there’s one thing a job in animal research will teach you, it’s how to hate animals. Chickens are disgusting things that bite and peck and produce ten times their body weight in feces per day. I no more cared about them than cockroaches. When I left that place, someone asked me, in all seriousness, not to tell anyone from PETA about the project. Hey, no prob, and same to you, dear reader.

Thus I learned an important lesson for the working world: it can always be worse. And with the economy going the way it is, who’s to say that you too won’t be reduced to working in ankle-deep bird feces for minimum wage in hundred degree weather? But don’t let the stress of finding a career weigh you down too much. In only sixty or so short years, the sweet embrace of death will release you from all such temporal concerns, and thanks for trying.