Well, since I’m reprinting Monty Python Society newsletter articles anyway, here’s the other half of Issue No. 10, Volume “Arr, matey!” (November 18, 2001). I call it “Boxtopia”:
Boxes: What are they? Where do they come from? What do they want from us? And, more importantly, where can I find one big enough to hold all my stuff? These and other questions have weighed heavily upon the minds of Penn State students and faculty in recent months as campus-wide box shortages continue with no immediate end in sight. While the University has thus far remained silent and released no official statement concerning this growing local crisis, insiders attribute the shortages to unexpectedly massive box consumption over the summer months, as well as to the recent emergence of the paper bag as a cheap and effective alternative. Already, its portable nature and surprising ease-of-use have won many converts, but while downtown businesses are eager to cash in by catering to a newly bag-reliant clientele, many at the University are less than pleased with this recent turn of events.
“I’m less than pleased with this recent turn of events,” says Dr. Eugene Everett Curmudgeon, distinguished professor of interpretative dance and self-described boxicologist. “This isn’t the Penn State I know and love.” Curmudgeon is only one of a growing number of area residents to add his name to a petition demanding the University take action — and although these names also include three of his own imaginary friends and no less than seven of his fifteen pet cats, Curmudgeon is undeterred.
“Somebody has to take a stand,” he says. “This has gone on long enough. Did you know if you go into McClanahan’s, they won’t even ask if you want your groceries in a box anymore? Bags are nice. You can put things in bags. But it’s not the same thing. If my thirty some years at this school have taught me anything, it’s that boxes are not bags and that bags are not boxes.”
Yet the number of boxes available to students has continued to dwindle steadily each semester, and early projections for 2002 are not encouraging, according to some sources. Some student groups fear that by as early as the end of next year, Penn State could be entirely without boxes of any kind.
“I’m a little scared, yeah,” says Brian Falardadardadardar (junior-turfgrass management). “For awhile I didn’t even know there was a problem. Then I asked my roommate Dave if we had any, y’know, boxes around back to put stuff in, and he said no, he didn’t think so. That’s when I knew we were in trouble.”
It was a desire to stave off that trouble that led Falardadardadardar and some drinking buddies to establish the Nittany Box Enthusiast Society. “We meet about once a week in my dorm room,” he says. “We talk about boxes, if anybody’s seen one. Last week our secretary brought in a packing crate and that was pretty intense. I guess maybe we should try bringing new boxes into town or something, I don’t know. Right now we usually just end up getting drunk and watching kung fu.”
Getting drunk and watching kung fu may be fine University traditions, but they do little to address the drastic box shortage crisis now facing Penn State — a crisis many at the University trace back to that fateful day in the fall of 1996, when newly appointed University president Graham Spanier instituted his by now infamous Three Boxes of Cardboard Program. The plan, devised by Spanier and his closest advisors, was for every Penn State student to receive no less than three full-size cardboard boxes prior to graduation. It was, unfortunately, a complete disaster. Many students found that they could not properly care for their boxes without seeing their academic studies suffer, nor could the University afford the exorbitant cost for the repairs necessitated by frequent box neglect. Furthermore, in just the first two and a half months of the program, University health services saw the number of box-related injuries on campus skyrocket.
“Students were coming in every day with paper cuts,” says Debbie Orangusprang, a longtime Ritenour nurse. “Terrible, terrible paper cuts. There would be packing tape stuck to their fingers, box labels everywhere. It was awful.” One student, in fact, had to have pieces of cardboard removed from his spleen. “It’s nice to have someplace to put things,” says Orangusprang, “but at what cost? At what cost?”
She is not the only one to ask that question, nor the only one for whom the cost of box usage may be too dear. Tom Bobnob (senior-business administration/golf management) believes that, contrary to popular opinion, boxes represent everything that is wrong with Penn State and should, therefore, be eliminated.
“Don’t buy into that whole box-lover mentality, man,” he says. “It’s a trap, man! Boxes are traps! You gotta think outside the box, man. You gotta knock down the oppressor’s walls. The age of putting things inside of other things is at an end. A new age is at hand — the age of keeping things where they are.”
That, however, may interfere with future plans for the University, which every year attracts thousands of dollars in research and government grants for moving things from one place to another. “We simply cannot continue to keep things where they are,” says one unnamed official. “They just don’t belong there.”
Whether the University will be able to use boxes to meet its yearly thing-moving quotas remains unknown, but one thing is certainly clear: this article is over.
I notice that in most of the stories I write about Penn State, everybody is invariably either a golf turfgrass management or interpretive dance major. Sometimes both. It’s just that kind of world, I guess.