In a shocking twist, the engineering students have announced that the annual engineering prank will be that all students will be going to bed at 9:00 pm on April 1st.
“For the last couple years we’ve come up with some really good pranks that poke fun at Swarthmore culture. The coffee-drilling oil rig outside Sci Center last year poked fun at our workaholic culture and that fake dorm on Mertz field the year before was a great way at making fun of how the school’s always building new buildings and no one ever really that thrilled about it. This year, though, we decide we really wanted to do something that would rattle the school to its core,” said engineering Major Andrew Anderson ’17.
The engineering students will be triggering a campus-wide blackout beginning at 9:00pm on April 1st. Wifi will be down and there will be no lights on campus. As Mary Lyons and Strath Haven are on a different electrical line from the main campus, engineering students will be travelling to ML and Strath Haven apartments occupied by students and manually destroying the electrical wiring. The students believe that in the absence of the light required to do any sort of meaningful work, students would just go to sleep.
“Most Swat students are only going to have an hour or so of laptop charge left when 9:00pm comes around and not much more charge on their phones, so by 10:00pm most students will be left in the dark. Once in the dark, there’s only two things to do: have sex or go to sleep. And let’s be honest, only 10-15% of us’ll be having sex. Our models pretty confidently predict upwards of 90% of students asleep by 10:30,” said Abby Teren ‘18, also an engineering student.
To those that may have safety concerns regarding the impending darkness, the engineering students have, of course, developed a contingency plan.
“We bought Pubsafe roughly 120 flashlights and and they’ll be randomly patrolling campus for the duration of the night. If anything goes wrong you should probably just scream. It’s not that big of a campus, someone will hear. Oh, I guess, the blue light beacons will still be functioning. But screaming’s probably easier anyways,” said Teren.
Although the engineering students will be causing the blackout, repairs will be left to workbox. The college is expected to be returned to fully functional status some time between mid-April and next October.
The department of engineering will also be hosting a reading of the children’s book Go the F*ck to Sleep by Adam Mansbach at 8:30pm in Hicks Hall.
Annual engineering prank is that everyone will go to sleep at 9:00 pm
