Long gone are the days when ice cream seekers at Vassar’s Gordon Commons dining hall had a mere one line to contend with. Now, those looking for a scoop or two can approach the freezer from either side and scoop simultaneously, a policy which has created chaotic scenes at Coffee & Sweets. Only half of the sliding-door freezer can be open at a time, and should the two scoopers want flavors from different sides of the freezer, a wrestling match often ensues. There have been numerous reports of limbs severed by the freezer door closing mid-scoop as somebody went for a flavor on the other side.
“It’s true,” one junior said. “I only wanted a little bit of my favorite ice cream flavor, Perry’s® Queen of Hearts, and it cost me my right arm.”
Other students confirmed that such incidents have been taking place. “The freezer door cut off both of my legs at the knees,” one first year student said. The student refused to comment on why any leg, let alone both, had been in the ice cream freezer, but these reports are nevertheless highly concerning and emblematic of the lawless new ice cream regime.
With scooping from both sides now possible, there is rarely anything resembling a line at the ice cream; instead, students form a mob and scoop ice cream in a manner hardly befitting members of a civilized society. Those who remember the days of the single ice cream line look back on it fondly as a simpler, purer time and see the current situation as the beginning of societal decline.
“We used to be a campus,” one senior lamented. “First, the ice cream lines devolve into chaos. What’s next? The purge.”
Although this may sound extreme, numerous subject matter experts have expressed similar sentiments. When asked whether the disorder at the Gordon Commons ice cream freezer was the first step on the road to worldwide anarchy and the collapse of the global economy, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman had only one word to say:
“Yes.”
Although an official statement issued by United Nations Secretary General António Guterres urged calm, he is said to have privately referred to the ice cream chaos as “the beginning of the end,” and a squad of U.N. Peacekeepers has already been dispatched to Poughkeepsie.
With financial markets across the world already in freefall and rioting underway in all major cities, students are already looking back nostalgically on the world we once knew.
“At least the bucket of spoons is after the ice cream now,” one said, a single tear rolling slowly down their cheek. “For that, it’s all been worth it.”
Sorry about the end of civilization, but is there any Coffee Toffee Crunch left for me?