| Rant : You Don�t Even Carry My Luggage, So Shut Up Quite often, the biggest headache about packing up for the holidays isn�t about the packing per se, but finding a place to store the hundreds of boxes that you have somehow miraculously accumulated through the short course of two years. How everyone arrives with two suitcases and leaves with ten is beyond my comprehension, particularly since I�m one of these people who have the innate ability to make boxes reproduce in front of me. One thing about the university in which I study at is that it is divided up into colleges, so there we sort of live in our own small community. When it comes to packing and storing, it is the prerogative of the college to determine how smooth this process is. Being a foreign student, we usually get some leeway. Students are allocated two boxes (two?!) for storage, whereas there have been times in my first year when I got away with putting 12 boxes into storage (yes, don�t ask how I managed to accumulate 12 boxes in less than a year). Anyway, things were okay in my college for some time. We put our 10 or 20 boxes in and no one said anything. You could usually get away with it by buying a four-pack of beer or grinning innocently at the person who opens the store for you. Now, this person that opens the store. In my university they are called �porters�. In fact, they rule the place. They know how everything works, and the entire university will malfunction (abort, retry, ignore?) without them. They�re the ones you go to if you need to get to some lecture in some godforsaken boondock of the town, or if you want to find out what happened the day before on the episode of that soap you�re addicted to. They sort mail, they monitor the closed-circuit cameras (though I have never seen them actually look at it) and they generally tell you where to go to get whatever done. In addition to all these duties, they also take care of the store. Because this is invariably a rant, I feel I have to tell you all a bit about the motley crew of porters that look after my college. There are four of them that do the porterage duty full-time, and it is these four that I shall describe. First, there is Martin. Martin (his actual name) is the best. He likes to appear gruff, but he�s easy to handle. You could slip him a can or two of beer and he�ll probably let you set fire to the entire store. I once had an engaging discussion with him about the relative merits of afternoon gameshows on British television. I nearly fell asleep talking about it, but these are things you have to do, especially when storage season looms on the horizon. Then, there is PMS (Permanent Menstrual Syndrome). He�s a gingerhead, walks with a slight limp and is always unfriendly. I have never, in my three years, seen him smile once and there�s a higher chance of finding an underground storage facility constructed by aliens in your room than getting him to be happy about opening the store for you. And no, he does not help us move our boxes either. He�s a porter like that. The third person is Not Travolta. Like the name suggests, he bears a not-too-striking resemblance to John Travolta, especially in the size department. He does not smile too much, and is only nice to girls. Or so it seems. He figures prominently in the rant later, so you�ll find out more about what kind of a person he is. Thankfully, he is the only porter of the four that does not smoke, which means there is only a 3-in-4 chance that the store will burn down under the porters� care. The last person is the one I hate the most and would take a 5-km detour in order to avoid. She is Cruella de Vil, and looks exactly the part when she has a cigarette in her hand (which is quite often). I have seen her skin Dalmatians with a gleeful smile on her face, and then I woke up screaming like Nicole Kidman in �The Others�. Anyway, she grumbles about everything, and tries to push off some unheard-of limit of 5 boxes on us. The other day, she actually offered me a pen when she saw that I was having difficulty with the one I was using. Unfortunately, it did not dawn on me to get a lottery ticket then, because I�m sure if I had done so, I�d be ranting about whether to holiday in the Caribbean or the Mediterranean instead. Last summer (and no, you probably don�t know what I did), I was about to leave when a friend and myself decided to put our boxes into storage together. I had about 7 boxes while he had around 9. This is by no means alarming, considering the fact that we pack our things into small, manageable boxes instead of huge trunks. You know, those that they used back in the 19th century. Anyway, we did manage to move our boxes into the store, but not before enduring a stink-eye from Cruella and some lame threats about charging us extra cash for exceeding the egregiously-imposed limit of 5 boxes. (... continued on the next page ...) |