3 February 2010
Putting the BS in BSU

Filed under fun

The broken photocopier was an eyesore. It had been taking up physical and visual space for as long as any of us in the Baptist Student Union could remember. Someone in the dorm had the key to the BSU director’s office and because of the recent turnover in directors and fill-in directors, none of the current administration knew that copy of the key existed.

Not a big deal, really. It’s not like it was the key to a pantry or a cashbox or anything you could really cause mischief with. So some people in the dorm (I’m not saying who!) just used that key to pull silly pranks on Liz, the newest BSU director. One night, mountains of ancient, never-used-anymore books from the so-called BSU library found their way past the locked office door, to be hauled back to the useless library shelves the next morning by Mark, the year-long semester missionary from Oklahoma. Another night, one of those orange hazard blinky light things you see on the roads at night when lanes need to be closed sent out its beacon of warning from within the walls of that office.

Mark wasn’t given the task of undoing that one. Instead, Liz asked me (directly, as if she assumed I had some kind of inside knowledge!) to tell the perpetrators of this fun prank to please return the thing to wherever it came from before the next morning. I assured her that I would relay the message, and of course the next morning it was gone. The pranks were never malicious or meant to cause serious problems, you see, so once the mischief was done it wasn’t a big deal for the pranksters to undo it if they were asked nicely, which I always made sure to pass along.

One morning, Liz found the old, unworking photocopier sitting atop her desk. No blinking lights coming from this thing; it was dead dead dead, and clearly the message from the perpetrator(s) was that this thing had been in the way for long enough. Rather than return it to its spot atop an old cabinet in the fellowship area, Mark and Jamie (Liz’s husband, a music teacher at HBA) moved it into the hall so it could be taken care of.

You see? It wasn’t just about mischief for these college-aged pranksters. There was often some kind of message involved, like why the heck do we have a BSU library that nobody ever borrows books from (when the library was finally gotten rid of, I rescued a book called the BSU Handbook or something like that, which was so old it contained a section on membership cards for BSUers, and another book, a four-hundred page tome called A Brief History of the Southern Baptists. Brief?) or happy birthday to our wonderful BSU director! Here’s a whole carton of ice cream left overnight on your desk!

A couple of weeks later (I could be wrong about the length of time), the copier was still there. Then one night while we were watching a UHM baseball or volleyball game in the dorm lounge, K___, one of our dorm managers, stuck his head into the lounge and asked if one of us would help him carry the copier up to his pickup truck, from where he would be taking it to the dump the next day.

It was kind of a good lesson for us. Of course K___ was being asked to do such a chore while a great game was on television, and of course he was asking us to help him at such an inconvenient time. I’m not pointing fingers, but K___ was a married man, and it seemed to us that the timing was probably not his.

But we all loved K___ and J___, our (married) dorm managers so we did what they asked whenever they asked it. Still, there was a game on, so I told K___ that JB and I would be happy to move it to his truck later. K___ had one of those weird jobs in agriculture (he was a soil agronomist) that meant he sort of kept farmers’ hours. He was almost always in bed by nine because he was almost always on the road well before five. We told him he could turn in and we’d make sure the copier was in the truck before he left early the next morning.

Some time after the game ended, we moved that ridiculously heavy thing, and as we walked from the parking lot to the dorm, I said, “We should take that thing apart.” It was kind of a funny thought, and far too fun-sounding not to try. We grabbed screwdrivers and returned to the parking lot, climbing into the bed of the pickup truck to do the deed. In the middle of our work, we discovered that the copier had its own built-in carrying handles that slid out on each end. That’s the kind of thing that might have made our original task (not to mention the task of whoever had left it in the director’s office) a heck of a lot easier. Too late, though.

It took really long. A photocopier’s got a ridiculous number of screws. But we did unscrew them all, leaving a wonderfully satisfying mess where once had been a horribly ugly eyesore. One of us dug up a business card from somewhere, scratching out the text on the face and writing new calling info on the back.

One of our dorm-mates, G____, had been having trouble getting his moped back together. It had been working just fine, but he’d taken it apart one day on the front porch and it had been a ridiculous eyesore for weeks. We razzed him about it incessantly, much to his annoyance, but it had been weeks and the stupid thing was still taking up all that porch space. So we wrote on the business card, G___ A_____ Copier and Moped Repair, adding the address and phone number (and G_____’s room number!). We tucked the card under K___’s windshield wiper and went to bed, a lot tireder than we’d expected.

JB’s room’s windows opened right out on the parking lot, right where K___’s truck was always parked. JB said that early early the next morning (only a couple of hours after we’d finished the job) he was awakened by the great sound of K___’s laughter.

I’m laughing now just remembering it, ‘though now that I think about it, I find this part difficult to believe. JB sometimes didn’t wake up when his freakishly loud alarm clock went off and wakened everyone else in the building; I don’t see how he could have been awakened by K___’s laughter out in the parking lot.

Later that evening, JB and I found in our mailboxes typed letters from K___.

Dear G___ A_____ Copier Repair:

Thank you so much for the excellent job you did on our photocopier. Never have I seen such thorough work: Whatever the problem was, you certainly took care of it! I’ll be sure to recommend your work to all of my friends!

Sincerely,
K_____ D______.

PS: Do you also repair cats?

2010-02-03  ::  me