On the Campus: December 17, 1997

Past editions of On the Campus, Online


Changing the paper in a cockatoo cage or changing a laptop's RAM?
When it comes to a student's loyalty, laptops win over friends and pets

BY KELLEY KING '98

FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF PETS AND PLANTS, college students are slum landlords. My freshman year I was friendly with a group of upperclassmen who had a monstrous aquarium complete with exotic fish and whimsical figurines. The tank, along with the makeshift cocktail bar on which it perched, was part of the boys attempt to give their common room an aura of "bachelor-pad." Though the room never quite became the babe lair that they had anticipated, it served as a gathering place for Monday Night Football and the occasional, adventuresome Thursday-night kegger. Unfortunately, their interior decorating scheme was not without casualties. One day, I happened to be watching while one of the bachelors, in the midst of animated conversation, absent-mindedly shook the yellow fish food container upside-down over the murky, opaque water of the tank.

"There aren't any flakes coming out," I noted.

The boy inspected the fish food dispenser and realized that the holes had been covered and hadn't been opened for days. Sheepishly, he rotated the lid.


ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS BROOKS '96

Unfortunately this discovery was made at the end of a semester-closing bicker week, which the bachelors had spent in a state of bleary-eyed intoxication. Three fish, having abandoned their naive hopes of being fed two days previously, were floating peacefully in a fluorescent seaweed and plastic-castle grave. A sober funeral was held over the dormitory toilet.

Similar dorm room fatalities run from starving snakes ingesting sweat socks to dehydrated begonias disintegrating into a fine brown dust. But as many college students forego their own personal upkeep, they can hardly be expected to sustain a living creature. Can a person who wears the same pair of underwear for four days at a stretch be called upon to change the newspaper in the cockatoo cage?

It's an entirely different story when it comes to a studen'ts personal computer. Although a student will endure a three-month bout of walking pneumonia without going to the infirmary, a specialist is immediately summoned when his computer contracts a virus. The personal computer -- high-maintenance, coldly impersonal, and hardly decorative -- is the one item to which college students consistently attend. For the many students who rely on it for everyday academic work, information gathering, personal archiving and even maintaining friendships, the health of the desktop or laptop is vital. Sleeping roommate be damned; in the event of a fire, frantic students would be seen darting back into the flames screaming "My Power Book! My Pentium!"

Aside from a pesky problem my sophomore year concerning a sluggish shift key, my Macintosh laptop has remained in excellent condition. But it is five years old -- practically elderly in computer years. A couple of days ago I decided it was high time to visit the CIT walk-in center and treat my computer to a software makeover. I had to wait in line behind a feverish young woman whose computer demanded much more serious treatment: her computer had crashed while she was on the eighth page of a 10-page psychology paper that was due in three hours. We sat next to one another in the waiting room; I flipped a dog-eared issue of PC World, while the woman clutched at her computer case and stared daggers at the closed double doors of the repair shop. A technician finally emerged, and speaking in soothing tones, ushered in the young woman and her inert Macintosh.

Within the next five minutes, two other students had made a solemn entrance to the center and took their place in line. They whispered their anguished predicaments to each other: irrecoverable disk error, melted monitor. An inquiry was made in my direction. Just a checkup, I said, a little guilty. I felt as if I had brought a stubbed toe into the emergency room. The repair shop doors swung open and the crash victim came out, with a little more color in her cheeks. She had been lucky; five pages of her paper had survived.

Who's next? asked the technician. Two tearstained, exhausted faces looked imploringly in my direction. Oh, go ahead, I mumbled. Adding a custom dictionary to my desktop couldn't justifiably take precedence over a crisis situation. And they were certainly entitled to a shower and some sleep.

There is a computer software ad touting that it is possible to do your taxes, talk to your grandmother in Scotland, and conduct a business meeting all while sitting naked at your computer. Because you are in the privacy of your home, alone with your computer. I don't know if such an intimate relationship between man and machine is the best thing for the enhancement of one's interpersonal life. For most college students, thankfully, the computer remains an extremely handy tool, whose expense, at the very least, prompts us to pay it its due respect . If our moms and dads were to be daily witnesses to the way we coddle our computers, I suppose they would chalk it up as a parental victory. The last thing they want to see is their 20-year-old handling their $3,000 addendum to Princeton tuition in the same way we treated our educational toys when we were kids. We have graduated from dribbling grape juice on our Speak and Spells to being suspicious about cat fur finding its way from the carpet into our hard drives. Of course, there is a best case scenario: that the some of the TLC lavished on computers can be shared with the cat in question. Or fish, as the case may be.


"Things I've bagged"
If quitters never win, then he's a nonwinner par excellence

By Dave Itzkoff '98

Illustrations by Chris Brooks '96

BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS, I should (hopefully) have completed the first semester of my senior year and will be psyching myself up for my last term at Princeton. Among the many traditions attached to this momentous time period, a particularly peculiar one comes immediately to mind: I am all but forced to drop out from every single one of my extracurricular activities (except this one, natch) to free up time so I can finish my thesis.
When that happens I'll celebrate my retirement from the position of Campus Club social chair, not just because I get to live at the club for another semester without having any responsibility, but because this marks the first time I've completed an extracurricular obligation without quitting or being fired. Maybe that's because my time at Princeton made me increasingly lazy and apathetic. Or maybe it's because I knew my stay here would be finite and I wanted to try out as many different roles as possible. Whatever the case, I've given up on far too many responsibilities in the past three-and-a-half years. For better or worse, those very experiences made me the member of Princeton society I am today. So join me as I nostalgically stroll down that aisle of the memory supermarket I call "the things I bagged":
The Daily Princetonian -- September 1994 to October 1994: It had come to the attention of my superiors at the Prince that I was a double agent. Not only was I writing for them, I was also contributing to the Tiger, the campus's humor magazine. A senior editor sat me down in private and said something I'll never forget: "You know, sooner or later you're going to have to decide between us and the Tiger." This was supposed to be the part where I, an impressionable young freshman, fell to my knees, begged for forgiveness, and committed my soul eternally to the Prince. Instead I walked out the door without saying a word, and, aside from an occasional letter to the editors, never wrote another thing for its pages.
Student Delivery Agency -- February 1995 to February 1995: This isn't the agency that delivers newspapers to students' dorm rooms (I'll get to that one in a minute), but the one that delivers all the other compost that doesn't get read: announcements for upcoming lectures, promotional fliers for student agencies ("Order a Tiger Pizza and get $1 off your next purchase from the Student Computer Agency!"), and the ever-enigmatic Princeton Weekly Bulletin. My first, and last, assignment was to deliver an internship brochure to every sophomore mailbox on campus.
I got the job on a Friday and promptly put it off for the next day -- only to discover that I couldn't get into any mailrooms, since all the residential-college offices were closed on Saturday. Given the material's timely nature, I dumped a couple hundred brochures off at each mailroom and hoped for the best. That night, a fateful call came from my manager: I was fired. Twenty minutes later I remembered the "you can't fire me, I quit" adage, but it was a moot point.
Newspaper Delivery Agency -- March 1995 to May 1995: You try driving a van at five in the morning. See if you don't jump the curb.

Rockefeller/Mathey dining unit -- November 1994 to May 1996: If the Peace Corps is the toughest job you'll ever love, this was the second-toughest job everybody hated. But I did it -- I served food with a smile to impatient fellow students, I washed the dirty dishes, I took out the trash. All that for just one reason: so I'd have a job for Reunions and get the chance to glimpse the Bacchanalian paradise that's the stuff of so many legends.

But as Reunions '96 loomed, the supervisor of my imminent summer internship called to say she needed me to start as soon as possible. What could I do? The real world beckoned, and I gave up my Reunions hours just days before the festivities. Needless to say, my managers at the dining hall were not pleased; there would be no job waiting for me when I returned in the fall. If I was ever going to get into Reunions again, I'd have to do it the legitimate way: wait till my class graduated.
Princeton Tiger -- September 1994 to May 1996: At some juncture in my sophomore year, this publication was my entire extracurricular life -- I wrote and edited articles, I drew cartoons, and I sure tried to sell advertisements. My superiors at the magazine were pleased with my efforts, so much so that they wanted to name me editor-in-chief of the 1996 officer board, nearly guaranteeing I'd be named the Tiger's chairman at the next changing of the guard, during my junior year. The funny thing was, I didn't want to be chairman, or editor-in-chief, or any officer at all. Any more responsibility and I wouldn't have time to do anything except my schoolwork. Not that I didn't love the Tiger, but I cared more about my own maturation.
I eventually left the magazine so I could become a resident adviser, so I could become a social chair, so I could write for paw. It was a pivotal choice for me. I still feel a small pang of nostalgia (or is it guilt?) every couple of months, when a new issue of the Tiger lands at my doorstep.

Sure, I'm a slacker -- I'll admit that to anyone who asks. But sometimes quitting really is the toughest decision you can make.


paw@princeton.edu