It’s 10 p.m. on a Thursday night, and we’re deep in Main Stacks, grinding out the last few pages of our paper due at midnight. Supporting evidence is scraped together as we put together a slapdash conclusion — barely above the writing level of a third-grader — as 12 o’clock rapidly approaches. The world’s most pitiful works cited page stares us down as we frantically begin to Google the key terms in our paper for the sake of additional sources.
In the throes of our final edits, we’re interrupted by the rustling of a trash bag and a request for us to surrender our precious midnight oil, the snack that has been with us since page one. Given our state of disarray, we absentmindedly hand over our sacred source of fuel. We silently say farewell to our trusty Goldfish and accept a fate of hunger along with a mediocre essay grade. This crushing attack against our precious cheddar goldfish makes for the ultimate L in a night full of losses.
We at the Clog understand the reason food is prohibited in Main Stacks. The risk of messes and creature enticement that can result from abandoned Postmates deliveries is a valid point against allowing students to eat inside. However, the crippling separation anxiety we face when we’re unjustly torn away from our beloved snacks is simply too much to handle on top of our many assignments.
As starving college students, two things are certain in life. The first is that we’re always hungry, and the second is that we’re perpetually behind on our school work. The solution to the latter is simple. We lock ourselves in the depths of Main Stacks to work on the two problem sets, three essays and PowerPoint presentation that we’ve been shamefully avoiding for a week now. Unfortunately, this solution of taking up residence in the library is problematic for our perpetual hunger crisis — we’re forbidden from so much as thinking about pizza while amongst the campus’s books.
Many of us live in the library. Science has yet to prove why we pay the astronomical Berkeley rent that we do when we spend most nights beneath Doe Library. It’s reached the point where the U.S. Postal Service forwards our mail to our study cubicle on the second floor. Main Stacks has become our home, and it’s unrealistic to ask someone to never eat in their own humble abode.
Before you suggest that we eat in a snack-friendly library, we’d like to remind you that there hasn’t been a free seat in the fourth or fifth floors of Moffitt since the school was founded in 1868. We’d be more than willing to munch on our Clif bar where it’s permitted if we could ever find an open spot there. According to the statistics department, you’ve got better chances of winning the SuperLotto than you do snagging a free table inside of MLK.
We’re not proposing we host Thanksgiving 2017 in the Level D West section of the library. Under no circumstances will we whip out a five-course meal to accompany our late nights of cramming. All we’re asking for is the liberty to eat our daily 14th serving of simple carbohydrates in the library. Nutrition is very important to us.
