Column: 'Press One For Blondes'

It's great. The registrar's office has managed to remove all of the work they need to do for registration without reducing the size of their staff. The people who formerly gave you shit because your permit stamp was in the wrong color ink are now holding secret sessions with the directors of each academic department. In an effort to hold onto their jobs, they are planning new ways to make it difficult to register. The voice on PARIS used to say thing like "Don't forget to enroll for a recitation for this class." Things are going to be more difficult in the future. The psychology department tells you to go see an advisor before you can register. Soon you will hear "In order to register for this section you must have departmental permission and say four Hail Marys." Or maybe, "Do seven girlie push-ups and push three for Spring semester." You should be allowed to chose other types of grading through PARIS. Currently, you can push one for a regular grade and two for a pass/fail class. If you intend on partying hard this semester, you should be able to push three for an incomplete. This would save a semester of unnecessary procrastination and still let your parents think you are learning a lot. You can milk the folks for book money that you aren't going to spend. They could tie PARIS in with this new RapLine. When you feel down, just give 'em a call. Push one for caring friend, two for help with members of the opposite sex and three for a copy of an old Marketing 1 exam soon to be re-administered. If PARIS begins to bore people, the Administration has a secret plan for a more exciting preregistration. It would be like Jeopardy. You would have to go to UTV and say, "Sheldon, I'll take AmCiv for 200." Sheldon: "Here's the answer: The publication funnier than Punch Bowl." Student: "What is the Red and Blue?" Sheldon: "Correct. You are enrolled." This crazy bureaucratic expansion has even gone to Student Health. They will only sell you condoms between the hours of 1 and 3 in the afternoon. This is odd. This is true. It would be all right if you regularly got laid in your 4:30 recitation, but otherwise these restrictions are a pain in the ass. I guess you should only be allowed to wear a diaphragm when we have a home football victory, and they also recommend restricting sex to the third Sabbath in March. The bursar's office is also in on the conspiracy. They are going to change PARIS to a 1-900 number. "Hello. Welcome to PARIS, the Penn Automated Registration Information System. This call will cost $21,000 for the first school year, and 6 percent extra for each following school year. Students under 18, ask for your parents permission before you call." This merger isn't a completely bad idea. The construction on Logan Hall has forced the College Advising Office to move into Mellon Bank. Mellon should buy the department out in an effort to provide more comprehensive banking services. Then you could use a MAC machine to declare your major. As long as sorority rush is coming up, they might as well add that to PARIS. We can avoid that week of superficial chat if freshwomen could handle the preliminaries with a touch-tone phone. Press one for blonde, two for sexy, and three if you come from a wealthy family. All of these complex technological changes have been very stressful for me. I felt like I might be in trouble, so I dropped by the Drug and Alcohol Resource center to see if they could be any help. The people there were very supportive. They gave me two joints and a flask of whiskey and told me to call them in the morning. Andy Sernovitz is a senior Political Science and Marketing major from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Mall Rats With Big Hair has appeared alternate Wednesdays. If you took any of it seriously, you missed the point.