For the past several hours, I’ve been staring at the drop/add page on my computer screen the way a drunk person watches the rotation of a gas station hot dog: with a mixture of hunger and disgust. Not five minutes goes by before I reclick the page’s refresh button, only to find myself seconds later cursing the heavens and shouting, “Buddha, Jesus, Athena! WHY!?,” knowing full well that somewhere in Gainesville, at that exact moment, some jerk is laughing because he has the class I want, and he knows it.
There are a number of reasons why I’m in this quandary. The first: The organization of the registration dates is unfair to all students. The second: There’s too many students and not enough classes. The third: I “forgot” when my registration date was, went “backpacking” across the United States and didn’t “register” until I got back to Gainesville “last week.” And while there’s a higher likelihood it’s the third reason, let’s not forget that this is an election year, and so I elect to forgo any responsibility for my actions. Instead, I opt to propose ideas beyond any logical person’s comprehension. Like this one:
We should retract the drop/add scavenger hunt approach, and instead institute drop/add elimination. To keep up with the media’s dystopic trends (with films like “The Hunger Games” and NBC’s new show “Revolution”), instead of students sitting in chairs waiting for their classes to appear, we should assemble the students who have signed up for said classes and set them loose against each other in a gladiator-style death match.
With such a spectacle unfolding on campus, I propose we charge admission to the coliseum — i.e. Ben Hill Griffin Stadium — at the same price as a football game. With increased revenue thanks to our new registration system and smaller class sizes thanks to the students unskilled in the art of war, what we’re left with is a win-win situation, which has a more appropriate economics term that I don’t know, because I’m an English major, not a business major.
Should the idea of blood sport prove too much for the university, still in the spirit of quenching public thirst for elimination, I propose a series of dance-offs. (See FOX’s “So You Think You Can Dance,” or the ironically titled “America’s Got Talent.”) What we have is the opportunity to impart a democratic forum — one in which the students vote for who they feel earned his or her seat in a given class, not just the person who “registered first” for it.
But who will judge such a fierce competition? Why, a panel of experts, of course. To which you’re thinking, “Obviously, UF’s dance department!” To which I say, “Don’t be so silly.” When I say experts, I mean irrelevant celebrities. Nick Canon is doing Target commercials. Nick Lachey is doing reality television. We all know Nick Jonas and Nicolas Cage aren’t doing anything, as well as that one Nick from the Backstreet Boys and that other Nick from that other thing. With this many talentless, able bodies, we have an ocean of disposable Nicks to choose from. And if UF is still hesitant about having its students fight to their grisly end, perhaps after the initial judging, we can have our panel of Nicks fight to the death. After all, it’s not like we would ever run out of them!
Which then brings me to my final plea: Do not do as I did and wait until the last minute to register for classes — at least to the extent that you’re driven mad by the perpetual refreshing of a page so you can take that one class you should have taken when you were a freshman. Don’t believe me? Please refer to the previous paragraphs and learn from my mistakes.
