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Volume CXXXIII, Number 8 |
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A diagnosis of mono and a secret transaction
IAN MORRISON
HUMOR COLUMNIST
Pudding. So much pudding. This was Monday morning, as I was helping stock the Thorne Bake Shop. We had just received forty-eight cases of the gastrodynamical goo, and I was stuck with the job of trying to fit all of them into the "secret fridge", a mini-fridge hidden inside the main Thorne refrigerator buried behind last year's - soon to be this year's - Thanksgiving turkey. What's more, in the middle of my way was a fireproof box on the one and only shelf of the mini-fridge, on which was written "Bowdoin College's TOP SECRET documents." This was all very odd.
Also odd, and on my mind as I began packing pudding into every nook and cranny of the fridge, was my roommate's recent diagnosis of mono. She went into the Dudley Health Center feeling under the weather, and came out diagnosed with The Kissing Disease. What was really odd was that she saw our very own esteemed Dr. Bensen, who diagnosed her from behind his desk from across the room while playing Grand Theft Auto Three on the Playstation beneath his desk. Troubled as I am by odd things, I decided then and there to begin investigating Dr. Bensen and the Dudley Co. Health Center (DCHC). I started flipping through Bowdoin's TOP SECTRET documents.
First things first: whatever students have been told on an individual basis, the DCHC has NEVER in the school's history reported a case of mono to the Maine Bureau for Reporting mono and Irritable Bowel Disease (MBRMIBD, or "mibrimib-ed"). In fact, in all of the school's TOP SECRET records the only entry I found on the date of my roommate's "diagnosis" concerning the DCHC or Dr. Bensen was that of a money transfer of $500,000 in non-consecutive unmarked new twenties from the endowment of Bowdoin College to a Swiss bank account - a bank account which is registered to one Dr. Bensen.
It all seemed so simple: the administration was paying off Dr. Bensen to diagnose students with mono, with the hope that theses students will leave mid-semester, recovering only a small fraction of their tuition and ensuring that they will have to pay for a ninth semester; or, perhaps the administration, aware that STD infection is the second most important category (after cafeteria food) in U.S. News and World Report's (USNWR) college rankings, was attempting to reduce the likelihood of sexual "hook-ups" and the resultant parade of initialed unspeakables about campus, again with the help of Dr. Bensen.
Either way, the result of these mono diagnoses was the same: with such a large amount of students diagnosed as "unsexable," Bowdoin has become a veritable sexual tundra; those students diagnosed, damned; all of us together, destined to forever wander where only the occasional lickin' - I mean lichen - thrives.
However, there were more layers to this onion of corruption (OOC). The overwhelming atmosphere of sexual tension diagnosed by the administration, while certainly aiding those cronies, benefits others even more. Such an environment promotes drinking, depression, and the displacement of sexual aggression through the activities of pornographers and sex columnists. Enjoying a snack pack as I continued to flip through Bowdoin's documents, I noticed some familiar names showing up again and again. Mysterious payments were made to Dr. Benson not only by the school but by others as well. These were the names of beer sellers, local "toy" shops, major drug companies, and one particularly pernicious sex columnist. As I continued to peruse a picture of the people ultimately in charge of this operation became clear. Forty minutes in the fridge and three snack packs later I thought I had it figured out: Dr. Bensen, Uncle Tom, and Kara Openheim were in bed together, working for their own benefit to ensure that none of the students were, well, in bed together.
But none of this explains why I was packing boxes of Swiss Miss into a ridiculous secret fridge already stuffed with Bowdoin's TOP SECRET documents. Could all of this OOC - false mono diagnoses, Swiss bank accounts, and a doctor, an uncle and a sex columnist in bed together - be related to the pudding?
To be continued . . . .
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