Toasted armadillos and the jon - How to balance the budget

First of all, I want to talk about a very serious topic which is somewhat related to last week's article on WPI's love for paperwork. This section is for those of you who live in either the Ellsworth and Fuller Apartments, or Founders Hall. If you're in your apartment reading this, please do this quick experiment to test my theory. I've been told this is true for many people: Go into your bathroom (don't forget to knock first) and take Newspeak with you so that you can follow along step by step. On a side note, why do people always take newspapers with them into the bathroom anyhow? Consider yourself following a continuing trend... All right, how many extra rolls of toilet paper are there in your bathroom? Count them. O.K., now count how many people are in your apartment, or suite for you Founders people, and don't forget to count yourself. (I always forget that and come up with the wrong number every time.) Ready? Now divide the number of rolls by the number of people in your apartment/suite. The Humanities majors can easily do this by hand. Engineers, I know you'd rather skip hot sardines off the back of a fat pig in a wagon rut under a cold southern sky than do math by hand, so you can go back to your desk to get your calculator. (That is assuming that there aren't some of you die hard engineers out there who have a calculator in your bathroom, and by the way, should really seek some serious psychiatric help.) Computer Science majors, or whatever you call yourselves now, can write a simple program to figure this out. Don't use integer typed variables. We won't be dealing with whole numbers here, and you'll get points taken off at the end of the article. You TK Solver people out there... well... If you can figure out how do to it, go for it. O.K. Does everyone have a number? Is your number greater than one? If I'm right, most of you just answered yes. Now ask yourself, "WHY?!?!?!?" How often do they come to clean your bathrooms and replenish your toilet paper supply? Officially, but not realistically, this is done once a week. Now if your number is close to or over one, think of the implications here. In theory, you're expected to use up your toilet paper supply every week. Otherwise, why replenish it, right? They always add more even if you don't need it. Now if your number is one, that means that you're expected to use up a roll of toilet paper BY YOURSELF IN A WEEK! Unless you're dreadfully ill, I don't see this scenario happening too often, much less every week. If you go through an entire roll (or more if your number above is greater than one) every week, I think you should talk to the people at Health Services sooner than the people at Res. Life... Even worse, this doesn't just apply to you. This means that every single person in your apartment must use up a roll or more of toilet paper every week. If you have this problem, contact the Massachusetts Health Center for Incredibly Wicked Bad Contagious Diseases immediately! This ain't a good sign, dude. I assume that you aren't using up all of your toilet paper, and that it ends up getting moved from the bathroom to the hallway to the bathroom every week when they clean. After a while, it gets kind of nasty looking just sitting there. Some people use these extra rolls for football practice, use them to build mini leaning towers of Pisa on top of the flush box, and I know both you boys and girls use these excess rolls for "extra padding." (Just remember that scratchy thin paper falling out in the heat of the moment is kinda embarrassing for you and disappointing for your partner.) For most of you, however, these rolls are not used for entertainment purposes, and instead go to waste.

Now I refuse to turn this light hearted article into a serious critical article implying how this is yet another example of how wasteful WPI is. I am not suggesting that you should be upset or write letters to Res. Services asking them to manage their resources better. I will, however, imply it. Remember when one of the airlines stopped putting that little wilted piece of lettuce that no one liked on the side of their in-flight meals? They saved millions of dollars. A couple rolls less of toilet paper a week for every apartment/suite on campus might have the same effect. Who knows. Numbers and reality are not my strong suit. I leave that up to the people on the hill. The point is, nothing should be taken for granted. WPI's having problems with money, and they look to cut big obvious things. Everything is an easy "quick fix." They think of cutting people and departments and not toilet paper. I'm not saying toilet paper is the key to stop tuition increases and the end to world hunger, (although that would be cool if it was and I thought of it) but there are many little things that seem to be, at least on the surface, a waste of funds that could be more efficiently used. Look at some of the categories and values in some of the department's budgets sometime. How much money and person hours do we spend cleaning up the campus when prospective students come? This includes buying and planting tons of flowers who really don't want to grow and look pretty this early in the season, and draining the quad lake pretending that WPI doesn't have a winter season. Most of the prospective students are from New England. They might get scared and not enroll if our campus doesn't look like the rest of New England when they come... Remember when they paid for all sorts of marketing research and a designer to make a new WPI logo? The administration figured that it must be a wonderful idea because of the tests and started printing all new business cards and letterheads. Then they had to change everything back to the original two towers logo within a few weeks because no one liked the new idea? Not only was there the point that it was all done for nothing and was a waste of money, but all of the money that would have had to be spent to pay a graphics artist to redesign every single form, and a printer to reprint every single piece of paper in the school with a logo that was more expensive to print was never an issue. There are lots of papers with two towers logos on them, folks. It would take years to quickly use them up as WPI had encouraged the departments. The paper would have eventually had to be simply replaced and tons of perfectly good old logo paper would have gone to waste. Will the advantages of changing the name of the school to WPI University quickly offset the same exact expense which would have been incurred with the logo change? The paperwork can't have the wrong school name on it, can it?... It's the same issue. I hope a name change is worth it.

Throughout the year, we've tried to show an angle of WPI not thought of by most. As an engineering school, trying to solve problems by looking at them from all possible angles is what we're taught to do. (Shouldn't the administration take the same open approach?) Most of the stuff we write is bizarre and pointless, but every once in a while, something good comes of it. (Anyone notice people shoveling a lot after our silly snow removal article?) We hope you have enjoyed our articles. If you're a student and have read any of our articles and thought, "That's *insert your favorite adjective here*, I never thought about that," we're happy. If you are in the administration (and from the complaints Philler's received from WPI faculty, we know you're reading this) and you've thought, "I'll have to look into that," we thank you. Keep in touch. For all the seniors and super seniors out there, good luck and hang in there. For everyone else, we'll see you next year. (I refuse to resort to "Have a good summer.") Take care and don't forget to write down suggestions for Philler articles you think of over the summer. Goodnight Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are...

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