Wednesday, January 31, 2007

The Battle of Printer Station 7: Last Stand

I know, I know, it's been a long time and I've been dearly missed. Spare me the façade of concern. The important thing is that I'm back to knock you off your feet with decadent, ungrammatical pleasure. There are some things, very small insignificant things which I'm sure will end up shortening my life span by vast amounts if not killing me outright in the moment. Some of these things, like alcohol abuse, subway train hopping, and knife fighting are pretty obvious in their dangers. However, today I encountered an entirely different threat to my life. This hideous, Satan worshipping beast came in the form of a comfortably overweight asian girl wearing what I'm sure she believed were fashionable glasses and a stare that left no doubt to her absolute unconcern for others. The stage was set in the busy Stern Computer Lab located underground where the Stern students dwell and lost College of Arts and Sciences students like myself accidentally wander into. I arrived confident in the simplicity of my mission, to print out a practice test for my midterm tomorrow. A mission so easy I could not see an obstacle in my path. I'm a man of a modest background so it is rare for me to be caught by overconfidence, but this life-ending succubus had other plans for me. As I pulled up my files at my work station I was still tragically oblivious to the plot against me. After I had ordered my computer to print the appropriate files I walked up to the printer with all of the social confidence that only a CAS student like myself could have and a Stern student could only imagine having. There was a slight crowd of two or three people surrounding the printer, but nothing out of the ordinary. I was calm, I actually laughed to myself about the nervous twitches of the others around me. To my dismay, I soon realized what it was that was disturbing them so. It was then that I laid eyes on the sinister being. She evoked a vile aura of wretchedness as the printer strained under her cruel whip. I stood there for ten minutes, confidence draining from me each time I looked at her and saw the darkness of her soul. The only thing being expelled by the printer was her dark work: pages upon pages, dozens of pages, pages with pictures, pages that looked like they had been copied from a book, shaded pages, dark pages, text pages, colored pages. Where would the madness stop?! I began to feel faint so I removed myself from the situation with a bit of self-control and decided to just wait it out. After idling at my work station for another 6 minutes I returned to the printer. Surely she must be done by now. The sight I saw was horrifying and I gasped in terror. She hadn't moved! I doubt she had even blinked; she still stood in that same casual, lack of concern for others air about her, selfishly hoisting her dirty work in reams of paper. It was then that I realized that there was not one shred of good in her and she truly was fallen. I looked around, I was not the only one being marred by her insidious acts. There were now at least seven onlookers all intently staring at this whorish fiend, their eyes pleading with her, asking how anyone could take part in such a despicable act. As she rested against the wall taking a break from collecting her unending pages I thought of repeatedly slamming her head into the wall and staring in her soulless eyes to send her back to the hell from whence she came. Instead, I decided to go sit down again. Ten minutes later I collected my things and returned one last time to the printer. I had not been wrong, she truly was a spawn of the underworld as she still stood there collecting her third copy of her 200th page with that same lifeless stare. It was a stare that reminded me of a shark, or of a doll. I walked away, without the 4 pages of text I had come to print… the beast had won. She's probably still there now, as you read this, preventing all from finishing their work.