Skool suCKz
I have a beef with a certain institution that has made me angrier than almost everything else in my existence, which to date has been principally defined by rage anyway.
I'm a student at the university of alberta, a big green slug of a university. Its the educational equivalent of Jabba the Hut, fat, mean, greedy and speaks in some jabber wocky language.
As a student at this bastion of knowledge, I get to enjoy the humorous display of art and science bending to the whim of corporate committee thinking. The students get fucked 50 ways a day without even knowing it. It reminds me of that crappy joke about superman seeing wonder woman suntanning naked, yadda yadda, the invisible man says boy does my ass hurt.
While on campus the price for any goods or services is %500 what it would cost 2 blocks away. What is this, hockey game pricing? It's retarded. I remember thinking of buying a hot dog at an Oiler's game, I asked the hot dog kiosk woman how much a hot dog was, she said $4.75. I laughed in her fat moon pie face. Then I swore at her for a few minutes and returned to me seat, hot dog-less. Like I'm so fucking stupid I'll pay $5 for a 20 cent hot dog. I was also pretty drunk on whiskey by that point anyway.
It's gouging people who live on incomes tighter than a cowgirls jeans. And the poor daft lazy students just pay up because they aren't going to walk 2 blocks to Mac's to buy their Dasani. I blame other students for their cattle-like lack of price sensitivity, but I abhor the businesses for taking advantage of it.
Now then, I read a funny little thing in the campus newspaper. I wouldn't bury a dead animal in the campus newspaper, just in case the animal accidentally glimpses at a few pages and is so angered by the bullshit it returns to life to liquidate humanity.
But this one issue had and interesting article about Coke. A few years ago my university, and the students union signed a deal with Coca Cola giving them a soda beverage monopoly on the entire campus. No Pepsi anywhere. If anyone was caught drinking a Pepsi they were forced to drink Barq's till their kidneys grew a goatee and made irreverent jokes about having "bite" .
One of the terms of the campus monopoly is that only a very few people are allowed to actually see the deal. So the Coke, University and the Students Union all agreed that the terms of the deal should not be public knowledge. Hmmm. That's strange. Of course I'm sure the deal is perfectly above board and that nothing untoward is in it.
Unless, maybe the whole fucking deal is a scam. Maybe the Students Union and the University took a big fat kickback and sold out the students to the imperialist coke tyrants. Those fucking eels. Not coke, but the SU and the University. Selling off students like a gallon of shrimp on the side of the highway.
Anyway, the deal with Coke was 3 years, after which I think Coke gets the monopoly into perpetuity. Part of the deal was that Coke could not change the prices in their machines without the agreement of the other 2 signees to the deal, namely the University President and the Students Union.
A few weeks ago on the weekend coke came in and raised the prices on the machines. This came as a surprise to the S.U. Apparently Coke didn't bother to check with them. This is hilarious to me. Why? Because Coke knew they could get away with it. What is the Students Union going to do to coke?
Coke cleverly reasoned out that the spineless brain dead social climbers that comprise the students union are less threatening an opponent to them than Loeb Cola. The sycophantic creepiness required to hold office as a students union official is not the mark of a warrior who will go to the wall to protect the interests of students. Why do I care? The truth is that even on an issue as stupid as this, it shows something about the character of the university. Screw the kids. Personally I don't give a shit, I like Coke and drink it all the time. In a funny way I understand why Coke does it, they know they can get away with it so they do. At least they're up front about it. They lie and cheat, but they do it without ever hiding their true motives.
You may think it's strange to claim all multinational corporations are greedy profiteers who wield economic powers to forward their own evil self serving agenda's. It may seem strange to attribute to them all this. But if you doubt that they have the will to warp and control people to their ends and back it up with their monolithic capital might, I suggest you try working for one. Then you'll get a pretty clear picture.
The university converts students into consumers, and in so doing it betrays the basic principle of education. Education has become the exchange of money for accreditation. Fuck that. Any idiot or psycho can get a degree, I'm living proof. They might as well come from a cereal box. My university is a shopping mall, my classes are "Thrifty's" and the "Gap". Its a total joke.
Well ha ha.