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BY ADAM DALVA

In print | October 25, 2007

Fall Break can be an exhilarating blur of guilt-free procrastination (otherwise known as “hanging out”), seeing old friends with new spouses and re-bonding with family who nag about not calling more while buying free food. All activities that make a lot of the stresses here seem less important than they were only a week before.

At first, being back on campus does not end this pleasant effect since fresh tans, anecdotes about red America and store-bought seasonal attire can make even the most deluged among us remember that there is indeed life outside a 357-acre arboretum whose study breaks always have hummus and where theses demand multiple steps.

Unfortunately, this Imaginationland of peace will inevitably break down and return to pre-break norms once an old stress/ex rears an ugly/distressingly attractive head. This “not if but when” can be anything from an immediate essay assignment to realizing that your alarm clock has been on for eight straight days, but my hunch is that for many, the frustration returned at the library printers.

Is any regular scene of social interaction more terrifying than the first floor of McCabe? The shifting social etiquette of the space is so dizzying that even Ms. Manners would collapse into a sea of stuffy third-person self-references, trying to figure it out.

You have the people trying to do their reading, the people jostling in line for fig newtons and caffeine, the comic-book patrons wondering why the second half of their graphic novel isn’t in the library, the magazine stealers, the facebook users (have you ever caught someone looking at your own page? Weird), the last minute essay writers who are terrified that someone will steal their computers, the study groups, tour guides, students realizing that the book that they need to write a paper on in the next two hours has been checked out for four months and the people who have been in the library since dawn and will eagerly talk in decidedly un-indoor voices to anyone they remotely recognize.

While even three of those groups in one place would be enough for Piggy to be thrown off the cliff, this giant conflagration of problematic elements can only result in a space that no one can really use.

While any part of the first floor is subject to this bizarre cauldron of doom, the nexus of all confusion can often be found clumped like hairs in a Hallowell drain around the first floor printers. With the other printers in McCabe a laughable afterthought of Jet-like inadequacy, the two machines by the entrance take on pivotal importance to everyone who uses the library.

Because the two machines seem to be playing a zero-sum game where both can’t possibly be positive at the same time, usually ten or twelve students are expectantly waiting for their sustenance to be bestowed around one exhausted printer.

The mixture of democracy and do-it-yourself vigilantism at these frequent events are staggering. While the scattered few will calmly wait by the side for their time to come, most will frantically launch themselves at the 60 page pile of piping-hot documents to sort out what is their now overdue essay and hopelessly jumble every other piece of paper in the line. Often, just when it seems practically impossible for there to be any further delay, thirty or forty posters will come spewing out while the perpetrator chuckles guiltily and avoids eye contact, while Marshall Morales quietly weeps into a biodegradable garden.

Further confusion is often evoked when a Mediocre Samaritan attempts to restore order and give everyone their own documents, resulting in a Phil Spectorish wall of clamoring sound that eliminates any chance of working within 50 feet of the problem zone.

Even beyond the doling of Dunder-Mifflin infinity amount of paper, social anxiety can set in for any number of reasons at this depressingly frequent event. I think we all can agree that, when you’re standing next to someone you sort of know for over 30 seconds, there is some sort of moral obligation to strike up a conversation or risk being viewed as aloof, but because everyone in the vicinity is getting progressively more distressed you usually just end up irritating people.

Between making small talk about the first page of someone’s essay that you have been caught reading, the anguished curses of those who’ve realized that pp. 17-20 are missing and the sure-fire knowledge that everyone sitting at the computers are staring directly at your ass (the 3rd row of computers facing the printers are, to say the least, disturbingly placed), the multi-sensory onslaught leaves most more upset than Oink users.

The worst thing of all is that there really is no escape from this cycle, that there is a concrete knowledge that any fall break carry-over effect will be shattered as soon as a document is needed. I suppose that, like my brilliant plan for Moustache November, getting a head start at an odd hour would allow one to beat the rush, but who the heck wants to be in the library at an irregular time? (Beyond, of course, the Student Council)

No, the lumps are coming, and they will shatter any sense of escape that we have left. Anyway, I would continue, but I need to go print out 12 copies of this to send to my family.

Adam is a senior. You can reach him at adalva1@swarthmore.edu.

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