Stuff Dartmouth Kids Like: Trips on the Wahh-mbulance

And so do all of us, Dart­mouth. We LOVE to com­plain, and as much as I adore this place, there is never a short­age of things to kvetch about. Also, I re­al­ized that I have ba­si­cally been using this col­umn to com­plain about things any­way, so why not ded­i­cate an en­tire col­umn to the cause?

The Meal Plan

I don’t even re­ally need to say any­thing about the meal plan and changes to DDS. We all hate it. Please change it back. Or at least do what Co­lum­bia does and write us a check with all our left­over DBA at the end of our Dart­mouth ca­reers — how else are we sup­posed to fund that drunk­pack­ing trip around Eu­rope? I will say this, though — new FoCo pizza is re­ally freak­ing good.

Fresh­men

This is just a clas­sic. Fresh­men, es­pe­cially fall term fresh­men, know noth­ing. I cer­tainly didn’t. I don’t think I even con­nected with a pong ball until, like, Oc­to­ber. This year dur­ing Ori­en­ta­tion, I heard a fresh­man ask his friends, “But why are all the han­dles gone?” I thought he was ex­pect­ing Smirnoff in frat base­ments. Nope.

Green­Print

I don’t know who in­vented Green­Print or why it is al­ways bro­ken, but it is. The magic of Green­Print is that 99 per­cent of the time you have five min­utes to hand in your paper, and the fol­low­ing things hap­pen: the girl in front of you de­cides to print the first four chap­ters of her the­sis, the red light starts blink­ing for no ap­par­ent rea­son and no mat­ter how much paper you feed it the damn thing won’t work. Or the server is down. The server is al­ways down. Also, I wish peo­ple would do their read­ings as sched­uled so they wouldn’t have to print out 400 pages of ar­ti­cles dur­ing midterms week when I have to print out all the slides from the lec­tures I haven’t at­tended.

How much work we have

You know that SNL skit where that girl Pene­lope al­ways has to one-up every­body? That is us when we talk about work. We spend so much time talk­ing about how much work we have that we just fall far­ther and far­ther down the rab­bit hole. You have a seven hour gov sim­u­la­tion? I have to study for a gov test for seven hours, and THEN I have to take it! You have a 10 page paper? I have two 15 page pa­pers, AND I’m writ­ing a the­sis.

The Weather

This is the Mac­Daddy of all things to com­plain about. Every No­vem­ber when the weather starts get­ting a lit­tle cold, I see at least sev­en­teen sta­tus up­dates with iPhone screen­shots cap­tioned #omgth­i­sis­notre­al­life. The weather is such a cliché that the Mir­ror style guide for­bids us from writ­ing about it. We all know it’s cold, we go here too.