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12-30-2022, 07:40 PM
(This post was last modified: 12-30-2022, 07:55 PM by
jacket3ree.)
I was a TA/grad student at Stanford. Such a grind we all left the premises to have fun. Menlo-Mtn. View/SF/Tahoe/Santa Barbara. A woman I liked thought One Step Beyond in Santa Clara was the it place, so I'd go there too despite despising the music they played. Who knew I would ultimately spend lots of professional time in the neighborhood dealing with various shades of infrastructure? I worked for Stanford and my employer left little time for fun, but I never thought they hated it. I never thought they owed me fun, either. I think I went to a handful of parties on campus and despite being younger than some of the undergrads, people "in the Program" did everything together and as I said, fun meant getting out of Dodge for a night or five.
GT was the ultimate hard ass school, but that meant work hard - play hard. I was in a fraternity, ultimately becoming its president. So I learned about the legal system at the age of 20. There was an alleged pipe bomb at the KA house when they vocally objected to our brothers who were Brothers, a few parking lot/property disputes, Lambchops who threatened to sue when we needed quick 5 a.m. access through their fence to get our wreck over to parade start on time (a good engineering/manufacturing lesson there) and yes, we had a brother who got drunk enough one night to jump off the roof face first.
Most distinctly I remember my first big assignment as a newly minted "External" Vice President. I had been Secretary the year before. That job involved ordering the jerseys and writing meeting minutes on my old Olivetti. Easy stuff. Elections were at the end of winter quarter, so the first thing an "external" VP had to do was pull off Shipwreck, our epic spring bacchanal. (The "internal" VP was in charge of mops and house upkeep. There was no upkeep. We didn't even have a lock on the front door.)
I was never so anxious in my life. Shipwreck was a 3 day orgy affair where we turned the house and environs into a tropical island where everyone was.....shipwrecked. My first Shipwreck (as a freshman Secretary) was incredible. I disappeared for a week and was scolded by my dorm roommate upon return. Epic. (Ooh I still can picture Thelma Louise (yes, real name) in that bikini top....anyway.....she was a EE with nearly perfect GPA, so that makes the memory legit!)
A lot of people relying on me. I had to organize or make happen: T-shirts, band, food, drinks, importation of beach sand to cover first floor of house inside and out, excavation of swimming hole in house courtyard ('Should we be digging around this footing? 'Sure. I'm civil. Geotech is next year, so I know what I'm doing. Just don't dig under the footing.' 'Roger that'), creation of a dam and pond with cascading waterfall down the front steps (I took care of that myself. Muy beuno.) "procurement" of slide for thrilling drunken trains of scantily clad party goers into said swimming hole, procurement of island accoutrements such as tree trunks to build the massive tower structure to support slide that must by law be at least 20 feet above roof line (how that guy let me drive a lumber truck around to "find" trees among metropolitan Atlanta area developments is beyond me to this day), procure bamboo for a festive tropical atmosphere {"Hey! What are you assholes doing! This is my cousin Eddie's property! Eddie is crazy! Crazy Eddie will kill all of you and eat your unborn children when he finds out!!!" Everyone runs back to the road with bundles of bamboo and machetes in hand. Steve G ("Croib") screams out: "Aaah! I can't feel my legs! I think I just cut my leg off with my machete! Aaaah!!!" "Dude, how high are you?" "Oh yeah, pretty high. And I took some shrooms an hour ago."}, and the piece de resistance: Driving out southeast of Conyers, GA in Tom R's 197x Corolla to pick out a pig, watch a guy shock that pig to death, bleed it out, and help us tie it to Tom's hood for the drive back. Then a piece of rebar shoved in from mouth to ass and two days of slow roasted goodness. (I think the discarded pig's head wound up inside the KA's chapter room eventually. Did not like those guys, nor did they like us. We were a little too diverse for their Confederate taste.)
In all seriousness though, I still use the skills learned pulling off a (fabulous) Shipwreck under tremendous internal and external expectation and pressure. Organize people and let them do their thing, but be in it with them, leading from the bamboo fields not a desk with a pad of paper full of lists. As they say, the chicken is involved (in breakfast), but the pig is committed. Plus the "internal" VP had to get it all cleaned up. I probably slept for a solid week after the last beer sodden fruit fly left the premises.
No interference from GT. We never thought it was their responsibility to entertain us; just stay out of the way while we took care of it. Although.....come to think of it, that might have been the Shipwreck when Bainer blew chunks all over the hood of the GT Police cruiser. Can't remember why they were in front of the house.