With Winter Term coming to a close and exam week just around the corner, the majority of the Andover population has been chronically exhausted. What is the cure to the fatigue that has swept across the entire campus?
Well, in past years, students would drink exorbitant amounts of coffee, but lately they have begun developing an immunity to the effects of caffeine. Many students tried moving on to Red Bull, a much stronger energy drink, but after only a week even that couldn’t give them the wings they so desperately craved.
The next week, students switched to Red Bullshevik, which had to be smuggled in via time machine from the now collapsed USSR. Totally typical of Andover students, they soon built up an immunity to that and did away with the red.
The student body soon realized that they would have to be more creative in finding alternative sources of energy, and all three e-proctors had no ideas for new renewable sources. Students have been setting annoying alarms on their phones that sound every three minutes, asking friends to repeatedly slap them in the face, stapling their eyelids open and having more frequent satanic club meetings to ward off the evil Sandman.
Others have begun to spend a lot of time in the ice rink. Its freezing cold properties can keep a student alert for quite some time. Within a matter of days, a camp reminiscent of the Occupy movement was set up on the rinks. The new ice village quickly turned into a center for trade, commerce and culture.
Students from all around campus made pilgrimages to the ice city to engage in trade as well as intellectual discussion. However, what we now call Andover’s Big Freeze was short-lived due to the massive quantities of students catching hypothermia and some wicked strong colds, and students had to look for yet another energy source.
The students’ next effort to stay up got a little hairy, as they resorted to keeping cardboard boxes of little woodland creatures in their beds. Every time students felt tired, they simply took a squirrel or two and let it run wild in their sheets. This certainly did the trick for a while, but soon enough the small creatures got a little too cuddly, and students started requiring larger animals.
Malnourished jungle cats and mother bears were some of the milder creatures brought into students’ rooms. These ravenous beasts kept the kids on high alert by watching hungrily from students’ beds and occasionally going on a casual midnight rampage.
This was effective, but, once again, short-lived. As soon as animal rights activists got wind of the operation, they shut it down with one fell swoop of several adopt-a-jungle-cat commercials with depressing music.
Alas, no solution has proven to be consistently effective in keeping the student body awake. Now we can only dream that a bright mind hailing from one of the many quarters will, using both knowledge and goodness, be kind enough to find a solution for this exhausting epidemic.
