Editorial: It’s not easy being tall

By Tall Mctallington

Amidst strikes and labour disputes in the Toronto post-secondary sphere, there is one problem that stands out on home soil. It reaches past such feeble foibles as evergrowing fears of youth unemployment or soaring costs of education.

Ryerson is simply not built to accommodate Tall people.

From dangerously low door-frames to unexpected sharp things below our line of sight, the hallowed halls of Ryerson University are a walking landmine if your head sits above six feet.

It’s not an overt kind of danger. The fine men and women of this campus do not routinely injure themselves if they too struggle with Tall People Problems. But the little inconveniences add up over the course of a four-year degree.

There are the brand new pants, shredded by an outlying piece of metal on a desk in a second-year lecture. The bruises from rails, rocks and roofs—the former placed too low to see, the latter hung too low for easy clearance.

Bus seats are often unbearable. With barely an inch of legroom on many of the TTC’s ridiculous, spatially efficient vehicles, even sitting is sometimes a struggle.

The fact is, the passive risks of being an unnaturally tall person at this institution, like so many public places around the country, often outweigh the advantages of being able to reach the top shelves.

And let’s talk about top shelves. If you’re going to build a society that challenges the vertically inclined at every turn, at least give us some more outrageously high surfaces where we can put our things. It helps us feel superior. The infrequency with which we are able to flaunt our height while on school property is simply criminal.

Now, we understand that you think our complaints are petty. That in a world full of racism and violence, the plight of the unfortunately enormous should be overlooked, or decide that it is not in fact, really a plight at all.

But until you’ve experienced the daily struggle of The Tall, until you’ve had children grab your legs because they think you’re a tree, until you’ve been asked every time you leave the house whether you play basketball, you do not know their pain.

It’s time this school and this administration look past such passé problems as tuition hikes, preparing us for the real world and struggling to find campus space. It’s time to consider the real troubles in this land—the troubles of The Tall.