As perhaps the most important tradition of junior year -- tomorrow's Hey Day -- fast approaches, members of the Class of 2006 have been scrambling to buy the classic red T-shirts designed each year to commemorate the event.
But only 800 juniors have been able to buy their T-shirts thus far. Errors in the order for 2,000 official shirts have prevented more than half of the junior class from purchasing the apparel, which is the staple of the celebration that marks the day juniors march through campus to officially commemorate the passage to senior year.
Planning Hey Day is one of biggest duties for the Junior Class Board every year. Elected board members are charged with making sure that every junior is equipped with a fake straw hat, cane and T-shirt for the annual tradition.
Hundreds of juniors anxious to purchase shirts waited in line yesterday, many to no avail, as the complete order has yet to arrive. Class President Pierre Gooding said the rest should be on campus today.
As news of the shortage spread yesterday, juniors flocked to buy those that remained.
"I walked by and the line was just so long," said College junior John Erickson, who hopes to buy one today. "The line went all the way to 37th [Street] from 36th. There's no way I'm getting in that line."
This year, the junior class board hired the Shirt Guyz -- a T-shirt business owned by three Wharton undergraduates -- to make the Hey Day T-shirts. But a late start and a mistake in the printing process prevented the Shirt Guyz from delivering on time.
"It's kind of our worst nightmare," said Wharton junior Jesse Pujji, the Shirt Guyz CEO. "It sucks that it happened on the most important order that we've done."
When the order of shirts arrived on Monday at around 1 p.m. -- already a few hours behind schedule -- the text was in blue, unreadable on the red background.
The Shirt Guyz -- who do not actually print shirts themselves, but contract the printing to a different company -- delivered about 400 correctly designed shirts on Tuesday, which promptly sold out. Another 400 were sold yesterday, though there were not nearly enough for the students who finally began to line up at 1:30 p.m. Class e-mails had advertised that the shirts would be available much earlier in the day.
Gooding, who is ultimately responsible for organizing the event, said he is frustrated with the shirt company.
"We were at the mercy of the T-shirt company, who has royally messed up," Gooding said. "There's nothing we could have done."
Junior class officials typically begin organizing Hey Day after the class elections in early April, in which Gooding and others were re-elected this year. Pujji said the Shirt Guyz were given the order about 10 days ago.
"The timetable was a little too fast," Pujji said. "Everything was a little more delayed than it should have been."
Most years, officials in the Office of Student Life take care of the arrangements for the shirts.
The Junior Class Board chose the Shirt Guyz -- which no class board has ever employed to print Hey Day T-shirts -- from several printing companies because, they said, the company offered the lowest price.
The shirts, though, cost the same $15 for students this year as in years past.
The delivery problems were caused by the printer that the Shirt Guyz regularly uses, Pujji said. He refused to name the business responsible and said he had severed ties with it.
Ultimately the production will go ahead as scheduled on Friday afternoon, with or without shirts.
"Hey Day is one of the defining events of your class's time at Penn, and it is certainly important to more students than nearly anything else the class board coordinates," senior class President Matt Klapper said.
