A Berry Important Issue

I can think of no other issue plaguing Dartmouth that so urgently begs forum discussion and student action than the egregious misallocation of iMacs on first floor Berry.

As Dartmouth students, I think most of us are very cognizant of the fact that we represent a great amount of diversity (be it economic, racial, geographic or in the case of certain mythological-mobile-theatre-players psychological diversity). So of course, this diversity implies that there is a broad range of personal resources to which different students have access and it is imperative that students with greater resources begin to understand that they must take advantage of their means and leave Dartmouth's resources to the less privileged and more deserving.

What does this have to do with frst floor Berry iMacs? Well, to begin, my MacBook Pro (age three years and one month) is in bad shape. In order for the screen to become decipherable, I must violently slap it for minutes on end until the screen decides that it has taken enough abuse and flicks to the right image. I love working in the library, but I hate to disturb fellow studiers, which leaves me with the various computers scattered around the library.

Aside from the Jones Media Center's pristine offerings, the only computers that anyone can actually be expected to use are the iMacs on first floor Berry. (The Dells are clearly out of the question, for obvious reasons that I don't understand.) This marriage of incredible technology to the greatest facetime hotspot this side of Collis has resulted in the chairs in front of the iMacs to be arguably the most prime real estate in the entire Baker-Berry library complex.

So as I walk down Main Street Berry (avoiding eye contact with the throngs of people that I'll be forced to smile at and say something that is equally friendly and meaningless should our eyes meet) hoping that the Baker and Berry gods will for once smile upon me and provide me with the manna of a two-year old iMac computer, I am filled with unfathomable fury when I see the most blatant disregard for resource-use efficiency since Homeland Security decided that colors would be its first anti-terrorism strategy: a student was using a brand-new, mint-condition MacBook Pro, placed directly in front of an iMac.

Filled with an urge to slam the laptop onto the ground and shatter it into a million pieces so that the student would be forced to use the iMac and thus better utilize college resources, I instead angrily walked over to a Dell, my day of studying effectively ruined. I cannot imagine what circumstances lead this student to believe that it was ever permissible to use a first floor Berry iMac in this manner, other than the possibility that it was a country music-loving Neo-Nazi that was complicit in the JFK assassination and has a drastically different life outlook than myself.

The point is that this behavior cannot be tolerated. While I would love to spend this entire article complaining, according to The Mirror, I should offer some sort of solution to the problem.

1. Form a secret society of first floor Berry goers who look for violators of iMac etiquette and proceed to blitzbomb each until the violator's computer crashes, forcing said student to make a trip to the Computer Help Desk (thus relinquishing control of the iMac).

2. Set the screensavers on the iMacs to obnoxious neon strobe light nonsense, so that if a computer is not being used but a student is sitting dangerously close to it, they will seize. This will also make it much easier (though also more dangerous) to spot vacant ffB iMacs.

3. Disband Kappa Kappa Gamma.

4. Hire Jack Stinson to stand behind violators without saying a word, just staring straight through into the violator's soul, until he or she has a nervous breakdown and leaves.

I hope that by addressing this issue in the public forum that is The D, none of these solutions will have to be implemented. Privileged MacBook Pro facetime whores will understand the error of their ways and become the change that I want to see in the world by moving over to that table next to the stairs down to Novack. Yes, there will be a facetime sacrifice, but sometimes you can't have your cake and be an asshole too.