Column:

No pennies for your thoughts

By Dan Friesen

Published Jan. 29, 2008

Look who’s back, children. That’s right, for whatever reason, the editorial board of this rag thought that I haven’t used up all my jokes, and hired me for yet another semester.

I know a lot of you out there are wondering why I would come back after having already written about a hundred columns in this paper. How can I keep it fresh? How can I resist the urge to cut corners and essentially rewrite old columns?

The answer to that question is probably too complex to explain in six hundred words, but I’m going to go ahead and try anyway.

As it turned out, at the start of the semester I was not on the Maneater payroll. This came to me as terrible news because (a) it meant I wasn’t going to get paid and (b) it meant I had to go into the Maneater office. For those of you out there who have never been to the Maneater office, let me tell you right now, it’s always a painful experience.

You walk in the door, and right away some weird smell hits you. It’s not always an unpleasant odor, but it’s always a potent, thick smell. This last time, it was the fragrant essence of sloppy joes; the time before that it was shoe polish. I’m sure that there are times when the offices are free from funk, but my experience tells me otherwise.

This olfactory concern is small potatoes if you are going to the office on any business, however.

I’m sure they’re good people, but god help you if you have to talk to any non-student worker at the paper. I was under the impression when I started at the paper that The Maneater was a student-run paper, but that apparently isn’t the case. I don’t know who they are, but there are a couple adults hanging around the office whose main job, as best I can tell, is to explain why I can’t do things.

This goal of my recent trip to the office was to get myself back on the payroll, which I suspected would be a far more difficult errand than it sounds. I arrived, whereupon the secretary informed me that to be put back on the payroll, I would have to provide my driver’s license and social security card. No problem there. She went on to tell me that I would need a voided check. I have a checking account, but no checks, so this posed a small problem. After I got a check from my bank, I would need to take all my information to some office in Memorial Union that was only open at 9:30 and 3:30.

What the fuck kind of office is only open twice a day, I asked. She didn’t seem to think this was as weird as I did.

It was at this point I decided that these Herculean labors were too difficult, and perhaps I didn’t need that ten dollars a week that badly. I told the secretary of my intention to volunteer my services, but of course, that was against university policy. They can’t pay one person and not pay another if the two people are doing the same thing. I’m not a man who likes policies, so I offered to sign a piece of paper waiving my salary.

And that, my dear readers, is how I am going to keep things fresh. Since they’re not even paying me anymore, I’ll be goddamned if they’re going to cut anything from my columns. No pay means no oversight. If I see as much as one comma removed, I’m going to scream bloody murder. See you next week when my experiment in filth begins in earnest.