By THEBOSTONBACHELOR.COM / January 11, 2008
Here’s a preview of a collection of short stories based on my two years at a tech school, the surreally-fucked Worcester Polytechnic Institute (or WPI for short–and yes, that verbal play on words a second ago was intentional). It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and all that shit. Only the names have been changed, everything else remains true. For those of you who’ve never experienced life at an engineering or tech school before, you’re going to be in for a car wreck of a treat. Enjoy.
Floppy
The kid’s name was Craig, but everyone called him “Floppy.”
Though only a few weeks of the semester had passed, he had already been unofficially crowned the campus weirdo. And this, at a tech school, of all places.
Floppy was the epitome of the mad scientist who never got laid. He wore his hair like a disheveled mop, as if a deranged barber had somehow mated the hairstyles of Bill Gates and a late-60s era George Harrison and glued the result on the poor kid’s head. Hygiene and fashion took a backseat to abstract arguments, compulsive porn-viewing, and a lack of general social cues.
Floppy would talk to anyone and everyone. Girls, guys, he didn’t give a shit. He was also oblivious to the fact that no one else gave a shit about what he was saying, either.
He’d come up with the rare gem from time to time:
“I had a lot of quasi-girlfriends in high school.”
“I used to snort pixie sticks because only losers do drugs.”
To make matters worse, his mother had bought for him one of those backpacks with wheels on them—even though Floppy was nearly 6 feet tall and looked about 175 lb. Of course, he was the only student on campus to own such a device—which brought him even more ridicule from the student body. I remember walking through the dorms once, and spotting on a random student’s door a printed photo of Floppy scratching his head. Underneath the picture, the student had written the caption: “Holy shit, I guess I’m not in Wisconsin anymore!!”
Despite all his social shortcomings, Floppy may have actually been a genius, come to think of it—or more like an idiot savant. It was tough to say with certainty. Based on my own recollection from my Calc 4 class (which I unmercifully flunked) freshman year, the kid was surprisingly prodigious when it came to math. Hmm…Shine II: From Rachmaninov to Ramanujan? Nah.
But my most memorable encounter with Floppy came at a date auction (if you can call it that) a month into freshman year. Vying for the All-American girl brunette on stage, each suitor had to first fill out a multiple choice questionnaire. The final question on the sheet was “How long can you last?” The answer choices were: A) seconds, B) minutes, C) hours, or D) I used to play bass and sing lead vocals in The Police (OK, I lied about that last choice). Well just as I was completing this impromptu quiz, Floppy came over and tapped me on the shoulder.
He leaned over and whispered not-so-quietly, “I’m probably the only one not lying about the ‘hours’—I can jerk off for so long.”
It was the kind of comment that would be interpreted as a come-on from anyone else, but not from Floppy. It was just Floppy being Floppy; you got used to it. And as I was about to learn, he would be just another face in the bizarre dystopia that I would come to understand as life at a tech school.
-The Boston Bachelor
