Byline: Kitty Cheung, Kelly Chia, Jennifer Low, Gabrielle McLaren, Nicole Magas, Onosholema Ogoigbe, Winona Young
The NASTY future of the SUB’s napping room
People are gonna jerk off in the new napping room. There! I said it!
That reality is one of the few horrors to come from the Student Union Building (SUB) — that is, if it opens “soon,” anyway.
The SFSS promises that the napping room will have “comfortable furniture” and even “small lockers” for students to keep their belongings in. But what if people hog the furniture? What if an understandably sleep-deprived student stays there for over a few hours? What if people fuck in the napping room?
All of that will surely happen because it has already happened all around SFU Burnaby. But now, SFU will have a cornucopia of concentrated fuckery and unholy sinning in one room! The SFU subreddit and SFU Confessions are going to get a flood of horrifying content, that’s for sure.
You may protest, “Maybe there will be a SUB nap room attendant, or security cameras!”
First, I admire your naivety, you sweaty summer child. But would anyone feel comfortable sleeping with one of SFU’s security guards hovering over them 10 feet away?
The napping room is a disaster waiting to happen. And I, personally, can’t wait to laugh in amusement and sheer, utter horror.
Winona Young, Head Staff Writer
AWOL food vendors of SFU
We’ve got to start by acknowledging that Burnaby campus isn’t exactly a food lover’s paradise. The options are limited, they can get pricey pretty quickly, and if we didn’t have Cornerstone, we would all be in some serious trouble.
That being said, most people have found their go-to signature dish for those eight-hours-of-lecture days and have learned to make Burnaby campus cuisine work. We as a (hungry) student population have developed poké addictions, have found Tim Hortons hacks to carry us home, and have finally been won over by all those new MBC cafeteria pop-ups that we thought were doomed to failure. Somehow, we manage.
But everything changes when the summer semester attacks.
I’ve been burned in the past week by multiple places:
- Running out of food.
- Deciding not to have certain menu items on a given day (especially if those missing menu items happen to fulfill your dietary restrictions).
- Spontaneously closing earlier than usual.
- Changing their summer hours without updating their information online.
It was a bad week not to pack a lunch I guess, but I still don’t understand. Capitalism is a circus, but it’s a circus I’m trying to throw my money at so I can fulfill my basic human needs. And the money doesn’t even land.
I know that summer semester is slower and quieter, but it’s just too sad when you jazz yourself up for bubble tea only to see that cold, desolate little stand with the grid pulled halfway down. Then comes the scramble to find sustenance at 7:12 p.m. because your last resort for food was closed.
Nothing is more awful than the thought, “Well, the vending machines take Visa.”
Gabrielle McLaren, Editor-in-Chief
Professors fumbling with technology
It’s a certain kind of unbearable when a professor’s microphone collides with their shirt collar and produces an eardrum-shattering pop. When this happens every 10 seconds during lecture, the collective student eye-roll is bound to ensue.
We’ve all been there: watching uncomfortably as someone with a PhD fumbles through a technical difficulty during class time. Document camera blunders, projector screen errors, microphone mishaps, rotated PDFs . . . I once had a professor who had trouble with Canvas. Canvas! The entire lecture hall stared at the projector screen in confusion and pity, offering half-hearted advice as our lecturer’s mouse cursor stumbled about the screen.
Look, I get it. If the mighty computer lords choose to sabotage our classes as a result of their frivolous boredom, it’s no one’s fault. But I find that many of these problems can easily be mitigated. Professors should either receive adequate training for the technology they choose to use in class or at least come into the lecture hall at another time to test out the equipment.
Having these mishaps happen in front of students is distracting, frustrating, and frankly unprofessional. I come to lecture to learn, not to waste the first 10 minutes waiting for someone from IT Services to show up and save the day.
Kitty Cheung, Staff Writer
Poop in the toy room
There is something rotten in the toy shop lately. When I walk down the toy aisle, I see something that utterly confounds me: poop toys of all different colours and textures decorate a noticeable portion of the shelves. And I don’t mean gag gifts, either.
These toys are not marketed to disgust kids, but to catch their interest. They are dressed up as cute purses named “Pooey Puitton,” or as a game called Flush N’ Frenzy, which encourages players to catch poop in their hands. Oh, that’s not your style? How about some squishy collectible Poopeez, a capsule toy filled with various poop characters with names like “Skid Mark” and “Lil Squirt”?
What little comedic value is to be had here pales compared to the spine-chilling idea of collectible feces toys. Please reassure me that this is only a strange, passing trend, because I am absolutely baffled.
What possesses toymakers to look at poop and toilets and decide that’s their muse? No matter how endearing these toys are, all that goes through my mind is that I am being asked to make the association between “cute” and “bodily waste,” and I don’t like it! I don’t see these toys as having much educational value either.
When the day comes that some innocent child tells me that a stuffed poop toy with the unicorn horn is super cute, I won’t know how to respond. Do I say, “Yeah, that poop sure is magical”? Do I internalize my scorching confusion for the trend? I’m not sure. Poop toys just aren’t something that adult life has prepared me for.
I don’t care what emoji or glitter you use to dress up your excrement, this is one trend I want to flush down the toilet. I shouldn’t have to explain why it is heinous to grab poop, even if it is personified as a funky character. I just want it to stop, for my sanity’s sake.
Kelly Chia, Staff Writer
The mountain-high price of food
You are sitting in lecture. The prof is droning on about a concept, clicking through a PowerPoint . . . then you hear it: the low, growling rumble of your stomach calling out desperately for food. You clasp your hands over your midsection as if to block out the sound, but it keeps coming.
This story sounds all too familiar to SFU students. Unless you are able to bring enough food in your already full backpack, you will ultimately be faced with a dilemma: either go hungry or fork over your hard-earned cash to pay for the overly expensive food on campus.
Tuition is expensive. Textbooks are expensive. Food doesn’t need to be. SFU’s Burnaby campus is located on a mountain and our trapped student population can’t escape to cheaper options. Also, not everyone is able to go home and raid their parents’ refrigerator at the end of the day.
The options at SFU are limited and spread widely across campus. This makes hunting for cheap options very difficult, especially during the short 10-minute period between most classes. Is it too much to ask that students not feel cheated every time they buy themselves food at school?
Jennifer Low, Features Editor
Bus hygiene routines
My fellow transit passengers,
Please groom yourselves at home, not on the bus or train. It’s fine if it’s just to freshen up — if you’re applying makeup or deodorant, you do you! But you can very clearly clip your nails at home. This is an unspoken rule of riding on transit: there are just some things we don’t do on moving vehicles.
There was one special incident in particular that compelled me to say something. I was just staring blankly out the window of my 188 bus, as you do, and I looked down at the floor only to notice soap suds just merrily making their way down the bus. What. I looked around my seat and found a grown man who looked like he had just come from the gym, soaping up his leg and seemingly pristine Nike runners with a sponge.
This was simultaneously the weirdest and most frivolous thing I have ever witnessed. There this man sat, rinsing his calf down with water before starting again. I watched in anticipation for him to stop. But I was to be bitterly disappointed when he, again, picked up the sponge to rub down his leg and shoe.
This is in the realm of things you should do at home, right? Your legs can surely wait just a little longer to be scrubbed down. Even washing your shoe on the street or in the park would be somewhat less confusing. I suppose that among spilt drinks, soap is not the worst thing that could be on the floor. Still, just . . . save it for the bathroom, all right?
Kelly Chia, Staff Writer
The AQ’s temporary brick slabs
It seems as though every time one construction project wraps up on Burnaby Mountain, two more are erected. At this point, the nightmarish labyrinths of pedestrian walkways, the chorus of drilling and banging, and the white caps of tarps on scaffolding are as synonymous with SFU as our pipe band or our lack of community.
But to continue beating this poor, dead horse, can we talk about the temporary brick slabs that have been laid on the Academic Quadrangle (AQ) stair landings leading down into Freedom Square?
I knew it was too good to be true when the tarps started coming down on the north corner of the AQ. I knew something was up when the ugly, grey, unsettled bricks lifted and slammed back down as I walked across them. I knew, down in the deepest corner of my cynical student heart, that the newly finished ground should not shift like a sponge under my feet.
So I was not surprised to learn that these stones are temporary. In fact, I felt that little thrill of vindication at being right. But this was very quickly followed by the sour edge of ugly rage at the thought: why not just do the job right the first time?! Why trample the fragile blossom of our frail hopes by taking down the tarps if only to have to put them back up again to re-lay nicer, firmer bricks?!
The answer, of course, is so Convocation won’t be disturbed by gaping holes in the ground. That being said, why not simply move Convocation to another location like everyone already thought would happen, instead of having to do the bricklaying twice?!
Nicole Magas, Opinions Editor
Shifting pathways in the AQ
So here I am, completely exhausted at around 12 a.m. and just about done with anything this campus has to offer. I was trudging my way through the maze of construction that I have involuntary committed to memory, when suddenly I hit a newly constructed blockade. I’m confused, but adamant that my internal map of what SFU has become is not wrong. However, there it is: a roadblock in my route homewards.
Did you know that the pathway connecting the Academic Quadrangle to the Shrum Science Building sometimes gets cut off at nighttime? You didn’t? Well, now you know, so keep that in mind the next time you’re staying late on campus.
I find that one of the benefits of living on or around campus is that I can stay on campus as late as I want. I can complete assignments that should have been done eons ago and I’m still able to get home without the help of hired transportation. For those of you who relate to this privilege, you can probably also relate to the practice of mentally plotting your route before you set off on your journey back home.
Now imagine this route changing unbeknownst to you. If you were planning to catch a bus, you probably missed it, and if you were walking home, then it’s just unnerving and annoying, especially if you’ve been working all day.
I’m paying to be in this facility. If SFU wanted maze runners, they should’ve just kidnapped us like WICKED.
Onosholema Ogoigbe, News Team Member
