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In This Issue

• What To Do With Books
• Craigslist Finds New Ways to Disturb
• Ovary Mining: Profit In Your Pants
• Letters to the Feditors
• Experience? Uh, no
• Sitting On Babies?
• The Internet = Porn. Porn = The Fed. Logically...
• "Which Came First, the Chicken or the Dregs?"
• Hey, Athletes! Need a Team? Call Me Ishmael.
• Hot Sex? Meh. Mock Interviews? Ooo Yeah, Baby.
• Swipe, Suffer, Suffocate
• From The Desk of Lee "El Cuisinart" Bollinger
• Practice Protectionism in the Bedroom
• Living at the Speed of 2.99x10^8 m/s
• Sensitivity Training Averts Termination
• Congrats, You're Fucked
• The Hierarchy of Columbia
• THEY Watch

Kimi Traube

Magicians call this misdirection. Public Safety calls it funny.

Helen Buyniski

Suddenly someone is there at the turnstile...

Like most Columbia students, I came to New York City looking for a life of danger and intrigue. After registering for more classes than a SEAS pre-med looking to double-major in death wishes and cloning-myself-so-I-can-take-more-classes, then achieving astonishing feats in the realm of social empire-building, I found myself in need of something else to make the adrenalin run through my veins, screaming like that guy in Union Square, only not as bad-smelling. The breakthrough moment was when I saw a poster on one of the bulletin boards all over campus, those sweet oases of financial opportunity-"Looking for work? Public Safety wants you!" The idea of defending my campus against the vaguely defined forces of evil was just what I was looking for.

   After a miraculously brief application process, I found out that I'd be working as Big Brother from 4 to 8 A.M. on Wednesdays and Fridays and from midnight to 4 A.M. on Tuesdays. I countered the typical responses of "but when do you SLEEP?!" by having the entire Furnald dorm sleep FOR me, which they were only too happy to do.     

    But since I've been working there, some really exciting things have happened! Don't let anyone tell you that it's just four hours of wishing for decapitation courtesy of a falling roof tile, or that people in clashing shades of blue yell at you in a mysterious and cryptic Sino-Spanish creole when they think you might be nodding off!

    Security is a fun and thrilling path to career advancement. If anyone tells you otherwise, they're probably a criminal, so take some decisive action and plug ‘em right between the eyes! This works when people are laughing at you for other reasons too.

    A large part of my job consists of answering the phone and saying, "Please hold." But before I transfer these all-important calls, I get to hear the most fascinating tales of freshman-dorm-elevators-gone-wild turning into public toilets, emotionally insecure romantics trying to overdose on Tylenol while clutching stuffed asps to their collective breast, mass puppy rape, etc. It is times like those when I see the meaning of life. I once caught myself sitting in that throne of all-powerful protection, while ruminating on how working my incredibly stimulating job was so much better than ever getting restorative sleep, thinking about what flavor my supervisor's ears were and then wondering how I knew that all ears had flavors. It was intense!

    As an aside, a lot of people think they know where the security cameras on campus are. Here's a hint: YOU DON'T. All those rude gestures you make are totally going to waste, so you might as well jam that finger halfway up your ass, there's more likely to be a camera in there. But make sure you do it near an RA at 5 A.M. on a Wednesday because I want to take the phone call. After all, there's nothing to make you feel validated like being the first to hear about your peers' hilarious self-inflicted medical problems.

     Here's another hint: I can see you coming up the stairs from the greasy den that is JJ's Place with your shameful piles of fried chicken parts, so stop pretending you don't eat food. Not only that, but I can see inside your rooms! I don't think I need to say anything else on that subject, and don't worry, I won't tell your roommate what happened to his toothbrush. Unless you think he's into that sort of thing, and you're too shy to bring up the subject yourself.

    The only real problem with the job is that despite the stress of watching such a massive array of monitors for hours at a time, I don't even get a badge to reflect my commitment to public safety or to whip out and play the hero during bank robberies. But every cloud either has a silver lining or pretends to have one, so I can use my imagination! Sometimes my imagination gets carried away and I think that there are subway trains rushing at me from every corner of the room, but I'm totally grounded in reality. Trust me. After all, I'm protecting you.