July 11, 2002
2:56 p.m.

A water main broke outside the student center Monday and it's been causing all sorts of havoc. We had to close the building for a while because there was no water. No one else could come into the building but did the employees get to go home? Of course not. We can't let a little thing like lack of clean water stop the workers of Kent State University.

Many of the university's records and other junk are stored in the basement (which is nicknamed "The Hole") of the student center, which meant they were being ruined by the flooding. It took two hours for us to haul all the soggy boxes into a truck. It was hard work and I was very thirsty. That made me even more bitter about the lack of water.

It seems that the flooding of the Hole is being used as an excuse to clean out the entire place. The amount of junk down there is unbearable. I never realized the extent of this university's pack rat mentality until I began cleaning the Hole. There are broken computers down there that are literally from 1975. They are completely useless, but the school insists on saving them for some reason.

Sometimes we find interesting objects. During the second day of cleaning we found some faces made out of wood. Today we found a garish reindeer with a missing nose and a dusty elf clad in pink. However, the worst offender was an animatronic bear dressed in leiderhosen. It was accidentally decapitated while we were trying to move it and that made it harder to haul to the dumpster. I had to carry the head in one arm and wrestle with its extremely furry body with the other.

We still have a lot of work to do down there. It will probably take a week to finish. I don't know how much longer I can stand that dank, dark place. Perhaps I can find a way to get out of it.

I feel a cold coming on...