Isolated as we are here at the College, sometimes the U.S. Postal Service can be students' only significant source of information about the outside world. As a columnist, I am fortunate to receive numerous unsolicited pieces of valuable mail from my loyal following.
For instance, Jay Strayer, an alert reader from Glen Ellyn, Illinois, sent me a copy of "The Amoco Motor Club Membership Handbook." Inside this lengthy tome I find that my motor club will come to my aid and fix my flat tire for FREE! A closer reading, however, reveals that this free service is limited to installing my spare tire. Anything else will cost me some cash.
Several points need to be made clear before I continue. My self comparison to Dave Berry would probably be classified by my Psychology professor as delusions of grandeur. I don't have a national following, and the alert reader happens to be my father. Finally, why should Dartmouth students care about the rules and regulations of the Amoco Motor Club? A legitimate question and I wish to suggest that there is a legitimate answer.
Road-tripping Dartmouth students might find themselves, like I did, at the intersection of East 17th and Broadway in Manhattan at 1:00 a.m. with flames emerging from under the hood, licking the windshield. I guess I should have paid more attention to the temperature light. In such times it pays to know the provisions of one's auto club membership. At the very least, memorizing the phone number might save one's life.
However, auto club details are even more interesting when considered as representative of a large class of knowledge: Things that no one thinks about at Dartmouth but are important in the real world.
One of the most interesting ironies of this place is that students frequently spend their off-terms, their time away from Dartmouth, in settings that offer a view of the world no wider in scope than that of Hanover. In fact, last summer hordes of '96s didn't even make it out of Hanover. Meanwhile, those who did frequently found themselves in internships which exposed them, not to the real world, but rather the wide world of investment banking.
And where do Dartmouth students spend their social hours when they are working in New York or D.C.? Well I have visited one such place in Washington, D.C. called "Millie & Al's." This bar had wood paneled walls, gross floors and a bathroom which consisted of a long dark corridor with a beat up toilet at the end. Sound familiar?
When I speak of the real world I am talking about a world where a co-worker is late because her muffler fell off. When she pulled over to remove what was still dragging, a passer by cut off the remainder of the tailpipe with the six inch blade he drew from his boot. Then he asked for money.
That is a true story about a woman named Louie whom I worked with over the summer. Louie was especially nervous because this happened in a bad section of town. Why was she there? Because when you live in a bad section of town you frequently have to drive through it to get to work.
Eventually most Dartmouth students will find themselves in a position where they study up on auto clubs, perhaps finding one that will do more than change a tire. We'll all deal with various other worries that are filtered out of our current utopia.
But how many of you will meet, know and work with Louie? When you are running a consulting firm, will you be able to take time off to wait tables? All of us seniors are worried about our upcoming entry into the "real world" but many of us will probably never have to deal with it at all.
