Op-ed Hey Administration! Lieb our Beirut tables alone

Author: James O'Brien

The biggest mystery in my life as a Middlebury College student is The Administration. I have absolutely no clue what an "administration" really is. When I close my eyes, I imagine a bunch of business people in powdered wigs. They are sitting at a long, wooden table, yelling at each other and pounding the air with gavels.

I don't think that's right though.

Actually, I don't really care what The Administration is because I already know that it is the root of every problem in my life. For example, today I found a note on the door of the sixth floor Milliken trash room. The door informed me via the note that I couldn't dump my trash behind it anymore. It said someone was living in there amongst the trash. That's not cool, Administration. I was willing to overlook the fact that you allowed a homeless man to start living on my floor, but when it meant I had to walk down three flights of stairs to dump my trash, I vow revenge! And your plan to ruin my life hasn't worked because next time I will take the elevator!

I also blame The Administration when Public Safety insists on taking beer pong tables because I know for a fact that the officers are cool people. If they weren't, I wouldn't be friends with them on Facebook. It's not their fault that part of their job description is the futile pursuit of Beirut tables. The real villain is The Administration who gives them their Beirut pursuit orders. One dangerously na've student once told me that The Administration is just worried about our safety. Ha! If this were true, a game in which students consume about a beer every fifteen minutes is the least of their worries. The bigger problem is that after they take the table, we students are at a complete loss for social activity. Sure, we could go to McCullough for the weekly "MCAB Forgot to Think of Something Else to Do Dance Party!" But that's just what The Administration wants us to do! So in rebellion, we valiantly sit in a circle, dutifully chugging vodka. Then we take a triumphant picture of three of us holding up the empty glass bottle. Just because you never know when Smirnoff might be scouring Facebook for new ad models.

I think I've discovered a conspiracy with this table taking thing. Most of us foolishly believe that Ron Leibowitz is just trying to raise money and look good on "Liebowitz Day" posters, when in reality he is the Middlebury embodiment of the warden from Louis Sachar's Holes. Many years ago, Great Grandpa Liebowitz buried his fortune inside a Beirut and/or beer pong table, and every weekend Public Safety has to take at least one table per hour, hoping each time that this is the table which holds the mystical treasure.

Warden Leibowitz can't stop us, though, since beer pong for college students is the same as brushing their teeth. What do I mean? If someone came into your room and took your toothbrush, your emotions would register a mix of angry and confused, but this would not stop you from getting a new toothbrush - or constructing some toothbrush-like apparatus with which to brush your teeth. So it is with Middlebury students and Beirut. After the bottle of Smirnoff is gone we play on, boldly using our bathroom doors like many have used them before.

I guess I still don't know what the word "administration" means exactly, but I will define it as "the powers that be who try their best to get in the way of what college students do naturally". My one plea to the The Admninistration is that they leave the Beirut tables alone (and please, stop the homeless man from interfering when I want to dump out my tissues and Nutri-Grain wrappers). I don't expect you to heed my cries, Administration, for you are the same force that spent thousands of dollars to come up with that silly Middlebury leaf logo. This was not money well spent, Administration. In fact, if you had given me a dollar, I could have handed my little sister a crayon and come up with a better logo in half the time. For Ron's sake, it was three M's in the shape of a leaf! Now that I think about it, I created that design in my fourth grade art class, and just because I forgot to copyright the damn thing, you paid some consulting company to steal my fourth grade art and pass it off as a "logo." (Omitted - a ten page rant about the melted tires behind Hillcrest.)

Is this really why we graduate and buy tailored suits and get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars? To make silly logos, adopt "strategic" plans and try to seem like we are doing something official? Note to The Administration - I think our time and money could be better spent playing beer pong.

James O'Brien '10 is from Medfield, Mass.