Editor,
I must admit my feelings of sadness last semester when the new printing policy was announced. After printing often and freely for so long, I felt like an Eastern European prostitute now having to abide by new regulations of the European Union. While this comparison may be slightly irrelevant, I hope it illustrates my initial feelings of how the school has changed.
In truth, the suspicion of printing fees entered my mind when we students first began swiping our Lobo cards to print. It slowed printing down but was still free. I found myself visiting the Lobo lab in down times when I could sit in the corner and print frivolously anything I wanted, recipes from The New York Times and the 2,000-page army first aid handbook (available online in PDF format). Well, you better believe times are different now. There I was on the first day of class, getting that giddy feeling, when my mind starts to run, thinking of all the nonsense that I could print for free.
Then it happened, I heard a young woman complaining, “I don’t understand.” There was a line, a long one, with students eager to deduct pages or dollars from their Lobo cards. The days of free and reckless printing are over, and I am sort of glad. Those pages that I print and tuck away into my bookshelf no longer haunt me during sleepless nights. In fact, I have resisted printing a single page in the lab so far, instead forcing myself to read required articles online. The new printing policy has forced me to confront my own wastefulness and taught me that I don’t need to print as much as I did.
And anyway, I can still print for free at work if I stay late and sit at the computer in the back of the office. Encyclopedia of naval flags (in color) here I come! Suckers!
