Hello again friends.
Unfortunately, most of you have no idea who I am. I am very important, so I decided to come back and inform you. I am Two Bits man. I am the coolest damn kid at this school, despite the fact that Wikipedia won’t give me my own article. I haven’t even had to say or do anything in two years to hold that post, so I have no worries about anyone contesting that.
I am here to offer a warning to all of you graduating seniors. Stop, take a look around you, and fail now. You do not want to graduate.
Some of you old people on campus, like you fourth-years who are pathetic enough to have pined over my absence for the past two years, or you even older people who couldn’t get out before now, might remember that I made a few threats about graduating myself summer of 2008. I did. It was a bad idea.
Don’t get me wrong, Tech is not an ideal place to spend years and years of your life. Coming back after a two-year hiatus, I no longer recognize half of campus. The old guy with the beard who used to run the place has been replaced with a different old guy, this one beardless. They are asking me for more money and there are more liberal arts majors and less first-year girls than when I left. Not a perfect scenario. The real world though, is worse.
I have entered the competitive economy, watched it burn, been left unscathed, and have come back to warn you, my fellow over-worked and exhausted engineers and those other people that we let walk around our campus, that this place is not that bad.
They give you free food here. In the next few weeks it will literally be like taking candy from a smiling, happy administrator trying to help you struggle through finals. There will be breakfast served at times when breakfast should not ever be served, residence halls will overflow with Krispy Kreme doughnuts and boxes of foods your PLs bought from Publix with leftover end-of-the year money. There will be banquets and end-of-year dinners for every club under the sun, and they will all be too uncomfortable to force you out if you crash them. I myself attended the RHA banquet this week. Am I in RHA you ask? No, I am not, but the food was delicious and I always appreciate the opportunity to wear a tuxedo.
There are no traffic laws here. I kid you not, I saw a man riding a segway up the handicap ramp in the Flag building the other day. Inside. Clearly, if you can stand up and balance on a segway, you are capable of walking, of climbing the maybe eight stairs in this building.
But here at Tech, this man was not odd, was not lazy. He was an amazing example of someone with enough disposable income to buy one of the world’s least useful techno gadgets and the stones to drive it inside. I bet he owns an iPad.
And ultimately, there are second chances here. You fail calc 1, you retake calc 1. You can’t hack it as an engineer, you switch majors. You can’t find your way down the straight sidewalk that is Skiles, you look at the huge color-coded map they put up for you. The shaft sucks, but at least when you fail here you don’t lose your job, your apartment and your girlfriend. Not that that happened to me of course.
I am just saying, before you rush down that long stage to shake the hand of this new, beardless president, think twice. Tech really isn’t worth leaving.