By Tobias Ma
During this year’s Students’ Union election, the student population voted down the MacHall redevelopment referendum and the CJSW levy increase. That’s fine. Nobody is mad. But we should really take this opportunity to re-examine how funds are distributed throughout the school, and assess where to trim the fat from nonessential services.
Let’s start with washrooms. I do not enjoy pooping at school. Especially during the winter, when I wear a coat and have nowhere to hang it because the coathooks inside the washroom have been broken off by people having sex in the stalls. I have to put my coat on the floor despite knowing that guys pee on the floor and don’t wipe it up. The men’s room floor is always speckled with droplets of evaporating pee.
Men pay money to maintain the bathrooms but the stench of uric acid entering the final stages of chemical half-life always ruins the air. And if women really do go to the bathroom for things besides makeup, the demands of their biology would mean that they flush the toilets more. That is more fresh water being mixed with human excrement, which could be redirected to the slurpee machines or frozen into ice sculptures to adorn those bike racks that nobody uses, except poor people who should buy cars anyway. So we should make washrooms pay-per-use. One dollar for number one. Two dollars for number two. And with timed limits. If you take longer than five minutes, a chute opens beneath you and you get flushed out into the Bow River for proving yourself as mechanically inefficient as your digestive waste.
As for the bike racks, two dollars per use. Every year, pool the money collected from the bike racks and use it to create a Hunger Games destruction derby between everyone who rides a bike to school. Everyone gets to bring a weapon of their choosing, the only caveat being that they must stay on their bike at all times. We will use part of the proceeds from admission to buy the winner a new truck and a sick rim job (for the truck).
I am not a person of aboriginal descent, so I do not see why I need to pay for a Native Centre. Or a Q-centre. What even is the “Q-centre,” and why should I pay for it? There’s a “Q” for you. However, as a progressive and tolerant-minded individual I believe that all cultures have a place in this world, so I suggest that we put the Native Centre outside, where visitors can enjoy the sort of authentic wilderness spirituality that this life of conspicuous consumption has stripped away from us. Also, that’s one less room we will have to heat.
To those of us who do enjoy heating, I would like to remind you that in 2005 the SU realized a motion by referendum to improve the Fitness Centre facilities, at the cost of $7 per student. Do you know what that means? The bro lifters managed to get their asses out and vote on something that mattered to them. They have discipline that we lack. But while exercise is a great way to learn discipline, climbing walls and attractive lifeguards have their price.
Everyone who enters the Fitness Centre must spend at least 20 minutes on a stationary bike designed to reroute kinetic energy into the underground generators heating the school. Not everyone wants to fund your lifestyle, athletes. Your clear skin, healthy heart rates and active sex drive do not benefit me at all, and I am tired of watching the swim club zip past me underwater when there is not even a hot tub to bitch in afterwards.
First-year mechanical engineers can keep their special computer labs if they contribute more methods of supplying heat to the building. Their goddamned faculty gets too much money anyway. Why should the university spend money to improve the domicile of the engineers? Make them build it themselves. This will prove whether or not they are worthy.
As I said earlier, I am a tolerant-minded individual, but I think religions are stupid and people who follow them are sheep. The last time I prayed was before my last Spanish midterm, and prayer didn’t save me, legally prescribed amphetamines did. Therefore we should convert the prayer rooms into the commercial, fee-saving opportunity they are, as the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard have long ago suggested. We could call it pay-to-pray. Five dollars for 20 minutes. And we would refuse to interrupt people praying, supposedly out of courtesy, but really in the hopes that they would lose track of time and rack up huge bills.
So much waste. So much potential for savings. If the students want to survive these tough times, during which we have been forced to downgrade our caramel macchiatos from venti to grande, austerity measures are necessary. If people are going to make out on those couches in MacHall upstairs, I want them to pay for it. One dollar to sit down. Two to kiss. Four if there is tongue involved because we will have to spray that shit down after. Non-essential services must take a backseat to our pocketbooks and our students should decide what kind of junk goes in the back of that trunk.