Ivy League Tales {12th Floor Adventures}

Bad things happen when you put a bunch of guys in a room with nothing to do. Unlike girls, who will commence a discussion about who knows what for hrs on end, guys will inevitably find something to occupy themselves with for the time being. It doesn't matter whether that 'something' is benign or not, it'll happen.

The computer lab where most of my late nights are spent at the end of the school year is on the 12th floor of the engineering building. It's quite a pleasant change from the bowels of soda hall at berkeley. I actually can see most of manhattan, depending on which side of the buildling I'm on. Needless to say, i've seen quite a few sunrises/sets from those windows. But we're 12 floors up, in a building that only has 14.

Recently, my friends and I have been wasting away hrs playing this highly addictive and counterproductive game called tetrinet. Sound familiar? It should. I'm not sure how many people were addicted to this game a few years back, but there was some serious grade suffering because of this terrible idea. It's basically tetris, except you're playing against people, and you have these special blocks you get to use on the people you're playing with. Simple concept. Deceivingly simple. But play long enough, and you'll end up with strategies and methods of attacks and counterattacks.

So after about 2-3 hrs of being completely and utterly unproductive doing hw by playing this game, we got bored. My friend and I were tired of losing constantly to our other friend. It was pitiful. But with another hr left before class started, what to do with that time. Homework was the last thing on my mind. So what did we geniuses figure out to do with our time? Make paper airplanes.

Yup. Make paper airplanes. Why? So we could launch them out the 12th floor window and see how far they would go, and, for extra bonus points, see if we could anybody walking below. Imagine this: 3 Graduate students, sitting around with scratch paper from the printer (which is out of paper), folding these sheets into sad attempts at flying apparatuses, and 'launching' them out the window. Higher education hard at work. 3 adults, giggling and leaning out the window watching our little planes flutter to the ground. We attempted all sorts of plane types. From the tried and true methods from elementary school, to the curiously complicated ones with weighting in the front and flaps in the back for lift. We even tried different paper to see which one would fly better. With all these different shapes, the outcome of the flight was all the same.

The sidewalk. Not the sidewalk on the other side of the street. The sidewalk under the window. Which means it only flew for 3-4 feet out the window, and went straight down. 120+ feet to fall, and can't make the ~50 ft across the street. Not even 20 ft. 5-6ft. Sad. What's even more disheartening? Most of our planes either went straight down like a rock, or fluttered around like any old piece of paper. With all those different designs, different fold patterns, with or without spoilers, same result. Three graduate engineering students couldn't even make a stupid paper airplane fly past the middle of the street.

Higher education at it's finest.