Excrement News Briefs

By Brent Zundel
For the MSU Exponent
March 28, 2013

Note: These satirical news briefs originally appeared as part of the Exponent’s annual April Fools’ Day edition, the Excrement.

Financial Aid employee friendly, too friendly

According to witnesses in the student union building, last week a Financial Aid employee was acting “friendly … too friendly.” One jaded sophomore spoke to the Exponent on condition of anonymity, citing fears that Financial Aid would insert “even more” errors into her fall 2013 statement if they learned her identity.

According to the source, she still has no idea what the hell was behind the crocodile smile of the employee who helped her. “It just gave me the heebie-jeebies,” she said.

She left crestfallen after learning that the employee could do nothing to help her unless she returned five separate forms, written in iambic pentameter and relayed to the office in both song and written form.

“And then that son of a bitch smiled at me and asked if there was anything else he could help me with,” the unidentified sophomore said. “Yeah, finally he told me to ‘have a good day,’ so I told him to fuck off.”

Hope in engineering students’ eyes just too much for professor to bear

After spending the week meeting individually with each member of his graduating civil engineering senior design class, Prof. Sven Kjell just couldn’t take it anymore. “The glimmer of hope in their eyes was just too much for me to bear,” Kjell said.

According to Kjell, nearly every one of his students expressed a desire to use the skills they’ve developed over the past four or five years to help improve humanity’s lot. “It’s like their entire education here at MSU has taught them nothing,” he lamented.

While in school, the inflexibility of the engineering curriculum prohibited many of Kjell’s students from pursuing worthwhile goals like studying abroad or getting involved in extracurriculars.

He explained, “Instead they spent untold coffee-fueled hours late at night trying to remember whether the integral of cosine is positive or negative, why their Excel formula won’t work and how the hell to take a partial derivative in cylindrical coordinates.”

Some of his students expressed interest in working in Africa or even addressing climate change in the future. With a small tear welling in his eye, he said, “Unfortunately, none of that is ever likely to happen.”

“They’ll while away the rest of their lives with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by calculators. When they find their passion — music, painting, brewing beer, you name it — they’ll do it on nights and weekends for the rest of their lives.”

As Kjell finished speaking, one lone tear raced down his cheek as he bent over to grab the bottle of whiskey he keeps hidden inside the fake computer monitor under his desk.

Ceramics students caught ‘hot-boxing’ kiln

A group of six advanced ceramics students was caught hot-boxing one of the studio’s wood kilns this Tuesday, March 26. The students were reported to University Police by “some rat-bastard freshman” who was walking past the outdoor kilns on his way back to his North Hedges dorm room.

Senior Archibald Clay, who is pursuing a BFA with a ceramics focus, told the Exponent that he was just disappointed they got caught. “We had it planned perfectly,” he said. “We used a low-fire wood kiln and fired it to cone 04, so we wouldn’t scorch any of the weed.”

He continued, “After we got the kiln going with wood, we just shoveled a bit of weed in, stood back in our makeshift tent and took deep breaths. Best. Vaporizer. Ever.”

When asked about the presence of drugs in the studio, Clay said, “Oh yeah, of course. I mean, what else are we going to put in all those damn pots?”

As punishment for the hot-boxing incident, the clay-covered delinquents met with MSU Dean of Students Matt Shares, where everyone involved nodded their heads vigorously while enduring a stern talking-to about the “dangers of marijuana.”

Cruzaldo barely finishes last-minute Monday Morning Memo

According to sources within Montana Hall, MSU President Waddo Cruzaldo just barely finished last week’s Monday Morning Memo before her 8 a.m. Monday deadline. “This week’s email was a real nail-biter,” said Secretary to the President Maggie Mann.

In an interview with the Exponent over her recent scare, Cruzaldo explained just how close members of the Montana State University community almost came to waking up without her weekly pep talk. “I was trying to capture the sense of engagement I felt at a recent administrator-student gathering,” Cruzaldo said, adding that she needed to find the perfect words to describe her experience mingling with students around a small metal barrel that dispensed a “delightful brewed concoction.”

Mann estimated that fully dozens of students would be distraught if they were to wake up Monday morning unable to rub the sleep out of their eyes, see a blinking notification on their smartphone, open the president’s carefully crafted message, and blearily fumble for the delete button.