Thursday, October 18, 2012

Today, I did Sociology

So those of you who follow me on Twitter might have seen this strange string of texts.
Y'know, I guess it's not strange. I tell you exactly what I'm doing.

But now, in the 25 minutes that I have before my laundry is done, I am going to explain what those tweets were about.

First of all, pretend my friend Josh's name is Jesus. It's not. But we're going to pretend.
Now pretend that Jesus is in a sociology class.

Okay, no, that's stupid. Here's what happened.
Two years ago, I was at a different school, and I was taking a 200 level sociology class, and it was a lecture with 399 other students and it was boring and I didn't like it.
One of the projects we had in 2-something-hundred Sociology was to do a deviant act.

People turn to deviant acts, we learned, when what they want are denied to them through legitimate means.
We were supposed to walk around backwards or in weird clothes or stand backwards in an elevator or something. I wore a blue wig around campus, and was supposed to record how people tried to get me to conform.
...Apparently I didn't pick a very good one because no one tried to do anything.

Fast forward to today. There are some very important things to know about today.
I have two friends, who are a couple, and who are named Jesus and Meg. Meg really likes Shockers candies. The only place on campus to get Shockers candies is in the vending machine. The vending machine, for reasons I can't fathom, seems to think it is out of Shockers candies when it clearly is not.

Simple solution: we break into the vending machine.
People turn to deviant acts when what they want is unattainable through legitimate means.

So we grab a wire hanger and hope that we can use it to simply knock the candies (they're in the second-to-bottom row of a nearly empty machine) out of their rack, tape a dollar to the top of the machine where the restocking man will find it, and be on our merry way.

Problem: wire coat hanger makes a lot of noise.
Solution: act like it doesn't. Act like we're doing nothing wrong.

The room is not crowded, but a lot of students are going through it to their dorms (the two biggest of the six halls in this complex are through this room). We have a table, are pretending to do homework* and one of us is making a lot of noise and sticking their arms in the vending machine slot.

No one said anything. People looked a little bit. Frequently we'd all crowd around and say things like, "Nearly! Oh! Oh, you've almost got it!" We were clearly doing something to that vending machine that we should not be doing.

No one. Said. Anything. My roommate stopped by for a bit and asked what we were doing. I said that we were breaking into the vending machine because the Shockers were broken. She shrugged and walked away.

We did this for two hours.
As we were finishing up, the group of six who had been sitting in the room the whole time asked us what we were doing. We told them the truth.

No one did anything.

So then Sam wrote a note saying that E2 was broken, and if you could ever so kindly fix that, she'd really appreciate it, rolled a dollar up in it, and taped it to the top of the machine where it would fall out if the door was opened to restock the machine, but was otherwise invisible.

As we'd said before we started, if we could pay for the Shockers, we gladly would.
___
*I pretty much can't type homework without wanting to type Homestuck. I have a problem.