Nervous, sun-streaked crowds of incoming Jesuit students marked the hallways this week as the new year kicked off. The usually exciting first day took a turn for the worse, however, as things got hectic. The servers at Jesuit were used to hosting roughly 700 iPads/devices at one time, but when more than 1300 students and faculty members tried to connect to the internet, things got “back to the future” crazy. Bang, the internet is dead.
It all started during first period when the first signs of chaos began to be strung across the faces of teachers and students alike, but no one thought anything of it. A couple teachers told their students “just give it a minute” or “don’t worry guys I’ll just go print off the lesson plans real quick.” As the rest of the teachers began to notice to internet crash, they, too, took drastic measures and began to print out their lessons as well. As previously mentioned in Mike Judge’s 1999 blockbuster Office Space, you can never depend on, trust, or rely on a printer to work during any situation, and things got ugly quickly. Teachers raced to the computer to see if their papers had printed, only to be looking at each other astonished that every single teacher had tried to print something within the same 15 minute time frame. The tech teachers were the first to realize the error of this. The printer arrogantly printed one piece of paper before saying “Error 5B: printer jam.” Needless to say an array of four letter words were thrown around, and before long the printer was thrown out the window by the theology department (it’s always the ones you suspect the least). The teachers came back to their classrooms to find their students fighting over what little internet connection was left.
Freshman James Applebutter told me, “It was my first day at Jesuit and… and a senior snapped my iPad in half because I had internet and he didn’t. The only thing he said to me was ‘senior privileges, fish.’ I’m pretty sure he’s on the football team so I wasn’t going to put up a protest.” That wasn’t the end, though. Many of the students moved on to the cafeteria thinking it was a hotbed for internet connectivity, but soon found it was a bloodbath. The varsity football team had just finished their morning workout and they were hungry, like wolves. They moved in like a pack looking for food, forgetting that all the freshmen, sophomores, and juniors who had come to the cafeteria had already eaten all the breakfast food and raided the “good stuff” in the preceding period. Things got out of hand. Junior Sean Salltywater said, “I think I saw one of the seniors rip the shirt off of a freshman, eat it, and spit out the name tag. Then he told the frosh to go get another one from student affairs.” One of the sophomores summed up the morning pretty well claiming it was like “winter had come and killed all the crops; we acted like savages.”
Luckily at this moment, Mr. Kent, a teacher in charge of discipline, who made frequent stops in the cafeteria throughout the day, walked in, and was startled by the scene unfolding in front of him. Using military-submission tactics, he raised his voice to an incredible height and bellowed, “The Time Is Now.” This sudden exclamation of a motivational quote silenced the crazed students and set the students’ minds straight as they pondered this saying and its meaning. As the students stood stupefied by the recent action, Mr. Kent walked around and made sure that everyone’s top button was buttoned. He then exclaimed, “Go back to class Gentlemen, the Wi-Fi has been somehow fixed by the remarkable workings of the computer department”. As the students walked back to class, Mr. Kent wondered to himself if a technology scare such as that would ever curse Jesuit like that again, and why Salltywater’s collar was still not buttoned.
