By Rob LaMothe

That title is a blatant rip off, but it works perfectly to describe what I do every time I head to the library to print something out.

Now, when I say every time, I’m not including those early morning rush jobs when I’m finishing a lab report at 5 a.m. three hours before it’s due. I’m talking crunch time, like when I finish a lab report at 11:15 a.m., a half hour before it’s due.

At that time, I’ve got it in my head that I can eat, watch SportsCenter, get dressed, watch an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, go to the library to print out my lab and then go to class.

But that would be in a perfect world.

Now I know I should get to the library earlier so I can avoid the rush and, hell, even starting the homework earlier would be a way to avoid the line, but this is not a perfect world. Anyone reading about the tuition at this place could tell you that. No, in this world the amount of time you spend in line waiting for your papers to print could take five minutes, or you might just never get them at all.

That’s right, never, like an eighth-grader standing in the corner of a middle school dance, wearing her best dress and shiny new braces, hoping for someone to awkwardly ask her to dance never.

Her problems aside, this is serious, kids. Why does it take so long for crap to be printed in the library? Take away the 50 people waiting and the 300-page print jobs some students insist on queuing up and what do you have? Me. Waiting anxiously to print a three-page so my lab TA doesn’t castrate my grade.

It’s out of control. I stand there waiting like a student in the back of Ben Stein’s class listening to his incessant “Bueller … Bueller … Bueller … ” as everyone gets their stuff before me. I wait and wait and wait as Mr. 134 gets the pre-draft order of his fantasy baseball league (seriously, people, everyone knows you need to be present for the draft, what if there’s a run on closers and you put Billy Wagner in the sixth round only to show up the next morning and see he was taken in the fourth) and Miss 53 gets her lecture slides for Biochemistry.

I shift from foot to foot, trying not to stare too hard at any of the exposed skin the girls bare under their sweatshirts and furry boots (GOD it has been a long winter) and I start thinking that I forgot which number computer I was using and I remember that I’ve been waiting in line so long that I carved it into my hand with my cell phone antennae to keep from forgetting.