So I try to time my lunch so that I don't run into the hordes of undergrads as they are getting out of class. As a group I don't much care for them. The institution that employs me, mind you not the institution that pays me pennies on the hour to be an instructor in Philosophy, aspires to be considered alongside the Ivy League schools. But it's not quite there yet. So the students are all in the top ten percent of their graduating class in high school, but they aren't the kids that got good grades because they had any real intellectual interests or passion for academic pursuits. They got good grades because, coming from wealth, they were supposed to. They needed good grades to get into law school or business school or med school. The campus noticeably lacks any sort of scruffy edge--everyone looks and acts pretty much the same. Like they just wandered out of a mall in any part of America. There is racial diversity, certainly, but in the manner of one of those old United Colors of Benneton ads: people with a variety of skin tones that all add up to a manicured blandness. Because class overrides race and ethnicity here.
So I timed my lunch badly today. I wandered into the river of affluent sorority sisters and fraternity brothers for the privilege of paying twice as much for a cheeseburger as I would off of campus. I overheard a young gal, wearing the standard uniform of short skirt, flip-flops and the equivalent of a hand towel wrapped around part of her middle, complaining to her friend that she has to pay seven cents a page to print anything here on campus. I know it's getting expensive for her to use her Dad's credit card to fill up the tank of her Lexus and I sympathize with her. Then she says "at Georgia Tech they can print for free. And they have these huuuuge printers. They're, like, industrialized."
I immediately begin picturing these huuuuge industrialized printers the engineers at Tech have cooked up: they're so big they take up whole rooms and they are composed of a bewildering array of steel pipes and wheels and pressure valves that are constantly manned by a team of little English boys, covered in coal dust; speaking with thick accents they manage to smoke two packs a day despite working eighteen hour shifts. The printers are steam powered and the effort of producing all those student word documents leaves the walls dripping with condensation.
