The other day, I ate a banana. I ate this banana on the way from my room to the library. Pretty simple act, right? Unpeel, eat, dispose. At least I thought it would be simple. What I found out about this seemingly normal action horrified me.
It seems that they've gotten rid of most of the trashcans on this campus. I walked through the library carrying my banana peel, feeling ridiculous. I'm not a sorority pledge. I don't have any mission to make somebody slip on a banana peel on the first floor Berry runway. So why the f*ck am I carrying around a banana peel?
You can read about the supposed reasons why there are no more trashcans in the quote-unquote News section of The D. This isn't the News section, though. This is The Mirror. And in the rusty-trusty Mirror, we columnists don't actually do any research. We come up with wild hypotheses and you go along with them. So that's what I'm going to do.
The removal of the trashcans has nothing to do with environmentalism.* It has everything to do with budget cuts and with social experiments. Everybody knows that trashcans are really, really expensive. That's why AD doesn't have any trashcans besides the ones used to prop up pong tables. Now you know the answer to that burning question. In order to raise money to help bail out Greek houses, the College has decided to sell its trashcans on the trashcan black market. The market has become flooded with such a marked increase of a rare commodity, and the Econ department is still struggling to keep up with the changes.
The lack of trashcans will raise money for the College in another way, as I have the sneaking suspicion that we are being filmed for a new HBO hidden-camera reality miniseries called "Trashier than Jersey Shore." The premise is simple: You take away trashcans, and see what people do when they have the choice of consuming less, littering more, or lining their pockets with trash. Eventually, our world will be so trashy that Snooki would be horrified to be associated with it.
The footage for this show will also be sold to think tanks all over the country. The best way to test the intelligence of a population is to expose it to something that it has never before encountered. I've personally never before encountered a world with no trash disposal services. How will we adapt? This will be the true test of our intelligence. ENGS 21 classes will struggle to come up with a modern alternative to the trashcan. Smart money says we'll just keep the bonfire burning through the winter and everyone at the College will dump their trash on the fire, letting it burn away. That'll really be kickin' it old school.
THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL, I guess, is that the new trash situation will be more eco-friendly. We'll consume less. We'll recycle more. Or so I'm told. And we'll get more exercise by jogging around campus to find the few remaining trashcans. By the way, trayless dining has been proven to reduce waste.
- I have no proof for this claim or any of the claims that follow. Except trayless dining really does reduce waste.
