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Campus cork boards cry for help

By Cork Board

Ryerson, please end my suffering.

I’m overwhelmed by flyers. There’s a poster for an event from three months ago—a networking social for a start-up’s pyramid scheme. I’m topped with notices for lab studies seeking participants, all demanding: Do you have anxiety? Which, quite frankly, makes me feel very anxious.

An ad for a math tutor written in Comic Sans with all the tear-offs gone, lacking both mercy and contact information, mocking me, proud that it is an aberration and affront to my existence.

It’s almost as if the flyers will never be removed.  

How did I get here? As a baby cork board, I dreamed of being a massive cork board in a Brooklyn bakery run by a broad-shouldered, gentle-eyed man named Giovanni. I would love to be adorned with ads for Thursday Night Bible Study and Dr. Love’s Miracle Bunion Cream. I would watch the owner trade gossip with Mrs. Reznovinsky, the florist next door. He would give fresh buns to the local school children while tousling their hair and telling them to study hard so they can one day become a great doctor or lawyer and make the neighbourhood proud.

But now I’m covered with flyers that will carelessly be torn off. This will leave behind little bits of paper around the staples that people will pick at absent-mindedly.  

This week, someone plastered me with three identical posters—advertising the Ryerson Stamp Collecting Club Winter Social. Their barbarity is senseless. Are there three separate stamp collecting clubs at Ryerson with identical names holding identical events promoted by identical posters, held on exactly the same day, at exactly the same time? Is the poster-plastering culprit a stamp-loving social butterfly and the club’s chief promoter? 

As for the multi-level marketing scheme ad from four months ago—why has no one taken it off? Is this flyer a forgotten child, never picked up from soccer practice because their father, while off grocery shopping, was seduced by a charming Italian man who he then ran off with to make passionate love in a roadside motel for five days straight before starting a new life together in Hawaii?

Is there even a point of writing to The Eye? Will students actually rally for my cause and stop the endless flow of flyers? How do I know they will even hear me?

Ryerson, tell me you’re listening.

Files from Uhanthaen Ravilojan

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