If I hear one more person complain about something at Dartmouth, I'm going to lose it. I'm in the 1902 Room right now, so if it happens as I write this I swear to God I'm going to flip a table in here, flip it back over, stand on it, go on a long-winded and obnoxiously loud tirade about the tyranny of complainers and then sit back down and not do anything about it.
Where do I even begin when it comes to complainers? One of the first complainer types that comes to mind is the gendered-spaces complainer. Sure, there are the girls who complain about being marginalized by the travesties of the Greek system and its many consequences. But that's not what I'm referring to right now.
I'm referring to the frat-basement-bro complainer addressing the cute sophomore standing next to him. He rants and rants, showing his sensitive side as he attacks the politics of gendered alcohol distribution and mass gender identities that go hand-in-hand with Dartmouth's Greek system. Somewhere along the line, he pauses to ask the girl if she'd like to play pong, and then calls next at the table on which his best bro is winning.
As they play, he continues his harangue, citing his friend's experience at Wesleyan as an example of the college-gender-interaction ideal. After the fifth game of sensitive talk-laden pong, they both laugh at the guy's none-too-subtle attempt to bring the girl up to his room, and they both walk up anyway. Of course, they've just had the sweetest, most sensitive frat house hook-up imaginable. Fuck that guy.
Then there's the First Floor Berry Greenprint complainer. Somehow, despite having gone to this school for two years, she is surprised and incensed by the sign on the First Floor Berry Greenprint monitor informing her that she must print her pie chart (depicting from which Greek houses her hook-ups hail) somewhere else. As she embarks upon the arduous two-minute journey to the basement of Carson, she utters in disbelief, "I know it was broken two days ago, and two days before that and two days before that, but I was so sure it was going to work today!"
After printing 10 pages of pie charts, she can't help but complain about the fact that some dastardly villain has emptied the stapler down there, probably just to mess with her head. Even though she was already going to walk past the information desk again on her way out, it just seems wrong that she has to wait until then to staple her papers. And it doesn't end there once at the information desk, she must decide between two staplers. She is forced to choose between the magnum stapler, which will accept a minimum of 20 pages at a time, and the micro stapler, which is unable to staple more than two pages. The girl's perplexed expression quickly transforms into utter rage, and she throws the pie charts at the information desk employee, demanding an explanation for the ineptitudes of Greenprint and the library's stapler policies. "Hey, my services are merely informational, but if you have a complaint feel free to put it in this comment card," says the work-study student, struggling to afford the expenses of her private school education.
"Screw you! You get paid $8 an hour to sit there and do your homework and not answer any of my questions and provide no services whatsoever beyond a frown face and an ability to hand me a comment card, which I could have easily just reached for myself when all I want is some goddamn information as to why the hell the most commonly used part of the library of a college of 4,000-plus students has only one printer and it never works and there's two staplers and neither of them provide any service to someone who wants to staple more than two but less than 20 papers together!!!" she responds. She takes a comment card, tears it into pieces and throws it on the information desk to show she's not messing around. Then she pulls out the stapler from her backpack, staples the pie charts together, and walks away. Fuck that girl.
Then there's the guy who just complains about everything. He complains about the food, he complains about the snow, he complains about the lack of kombucha on campus, he complains about Tom Mandel and he even complains about the inconceivably long distance Hanover is from a three-ring circus. And then, instead of doing anything to fix anything, he just sits there and types up articles for The D, each one little more than a string of complaints of the latest injustice at Dartmouth that he has perceived. He even writes articles complaining about people who complain. Fuck that guy.
