(Note to readers: Due to unbelievable events, Ula, the turtle you voted for in order for its owner to win a trip to Cancun, actually won! I’m sure this is obviously due to the shameless plug in The Observer. Now, who do I invite to Cancun?)

On another note unrelated to Facebook, I have risen to the status of senior at CWRU and the University continues to hold close one of its great mysteries: printing.

I used to give tours for Undergraduate Admission and watch jaws drop as I explained to perspective families about the possibility of 1000 pages of free printing provided around campus for every student every semester.

Firstly, this number is wrong! I’ve been lying to potential students and myself for years. It’s 1000 pages per year. Classic bait and switch technique!

Then, I promptly reminded them that nothing on this campus is free. Instead, they just hiked your tuition in order to pay for it.

Now after being struck by the ability to skip buying a printer before freshman year, I can only call “free” printing on this campus one thing: highway robbery!

Exhibit A: The Nord computer lab. You would intuitively believe you could use all 500 pages in this lab. Oh no! Instead, you receive $5 of printing. This simply means you can print out only 100 pages before you go broke. After Nord, the hunt begins.

Exhibit B: Wade and Fribley printers. We all know the likelihood of these printers working is slim. In fact, I once printed a page, the printer jammed, had it fixed by a kind student, printed the second page, had the printer jam again, then had the now irritated student return only for it to jam again. The student and I judged that the printer was out of order. Typical.

And should we really believe we could print directly from our rooms to the printer queue? If that was true, I could have actually spent freshman year being productive.

Exhibit C: Thwing printers, also known as the Zone Two Cyber Café. We should just count this out of the running. If you want to print here, you should just wait in line for the entire Cleveland community to stop surfing the web before you have a chance to send you document to the printer.

Exhibit D: Robbery of printing money. If you forget to press the little button to stop the printer from taking your stored up money, the kind student behind you is able to take advantage of having more than 1,000 pages per year. Think of the horror!

Exhibit E: Weatherhead printing. Hidden in the labyrinth of the PBL basement, the management school’s lab affords you even more free printing – including color prints! The only problem is the complete disarray of the desk when your job has printed. And if you touch the printer instead of the worker, you should just be arrested on the spot.

Exhibit F: If you don’t use all of your printing, it just vanishes. And, unlike all of SEC organization budgets – there’s no rollover or refund. It goes back to the cauldron of unused prints.

In order to rectify this theft, I propose we start a fund from this unused money to go towards a new, more worthy cause: more random pieces of art around campus.