They took the bar...

Last Friday marked the 3 year revocation anniversary of the Phi Sigma Tau Fraternity Charter by the University of Redlands. In the immortal words of Bluto,

"They took the bar. The whole ****ing bar." -Animal House

To commemorate this depressing day I had fully intended to revisit the events leading up to our extinction in the form of a blog tribute.

Sadly, when I attempted to access my Redlands.edu e-mail address to find some saved photos and reinstatement petition letters to use in my blog, I found that my e-mail had befallen the same fate as my fraternity. The University of Redlands had shut it down and it was no longer active. Attempts to revive my poor e-mail address were met with this reply:

Jeff,

There was a short time after the accounts were deactivated that we were able to reactivate them. However that time has expired and we are now unable to reactivate.

-Bruce E********

Work Order No.: 24685

To me, this is almost more depressing than losing the fraternity charter. At least with the fraternity I still have things such as my pledge book, fraternity letters, and random relics that were passed down to me by my big brother to hold onto. Not to mention the friends, brothers and lifelong lessons I learned while being in a fraternity. But as for my e-mail address, there is really no other way to describe this loss than straight up heartbreaking.

My Toshiba laptop that I had throughout college succumbed to the blue screen of death years ago, and with it went a treasure trove of college term papers and photos. While I took this loss pretty hard, I never had a printer in my room and would always e-mail papers to myself and print them out in the Fletcher-Jones Computer Center. Therefore, my Redlands.edu e-mail had essentially become a backup of every paper I ever wrote in college, as well as many other gems.

In order to commemorate the loss of my Redlands.edu e-mail, I’d like to read off a list of things that perished along with it, and say a few parting words about some of them.

Random Papers: From Government 101, to Comparative Literature, I will no longer be able to revisit countless papers from my four year tenure at the University of Redlands. While I probably wouldn’t even want claim to have written half of these papers, it would still be nice to be able to look back on how my writing style has developed/regressed over the years.

My Senior Capstone Paper: I spent countless hours throughout my senior year on this paper… ok, that’s kind of a lie. I wrote the paper in about a week at the end of my first semester, and never turned in a rough draft which was 30% of my grade. As a result I failed the course and had to repeat my capstone class second semester and revise the paper. I think the second time around I spent about one night editing the paper and ended up with a B+ in the class. Thanks Professor Pedace!

Viagra offers: I’m pretty sure I had over a thousand offers for Viagra sitting in my spam box. Luckily, I have about 366 of the same offers in my work spam box to browse through should I ever feel the need to reminisce.

Pledging photos: Granted that it may be in the best interest of my pledge class that these pictures have been lost forever due to their somewhat compromising nature; these were always good for a few laughs and will be greatly missed. Breakdown!

Phi Tau Petition Letter: This may be The Heart of the Ocean of my lost e-mail collection (wow… that’s two Titanic references on my blog now). After losing the fraternity charter for the second (and final) time during my four year tenure at the University of Redlands, I wrote this letter as President of the Fraternity in an attempt to regain our charter. Included with it was a petition that contained signatures from over 500 students that had been collected in support of the letter.

It is definitely one of more memorable things that I ever wrote in college and while it ended up being a failure (as is evident by the fact that the Phi Sigma Tau Fraternity is not recognized as an active fraternity at the University of Redlands), I am still proud of the attempt and the contents of the letter.

As for The Heart of the Ocean reference, there is a small chance that I saved a paper copy of these somewhere in one of the fraternity notebooks that I have packed away at my parents house. I’ll keep my fingers crossed…

Silly e-mails from Mom: My mom used to forward me silly e-mails that pretty much feel into the category of spam. Usually these consisted of some goofy animation bouncing up and down on my screen. While these were always somewhat annoying, they were usually good a small chuckle. Luckily, much like the Viagra adds, she still sends these kinds of e-mails to my work e-mail… and I totally just talked about my mom and Viagra in the same sentence. I am going to go shoot myself right now.

PokerRoom.com Account: I used to work in The Fletcher-Jones Computer Center as part of my work study. Basically, I would sit there for 5-10 hours a week doing homework, playing online poker, and occasionally answering a question about how to print something.

My pokerroom.com account still has about $20 on it, but since I can’t remember the login or password, and I can’t request that they send me a new password since my account was linked to my Redlands.edu e-mail, I’m pretty much up the creek on this one. RIP Andrew Jackson…

Facebook: While I haven’t yet lost my Facebook account, it is certainly tied to my Redlands.edu e-mail. Will this cause my Facebook account to eventually go inactive? Only time will tell…

In retrospect, assuming that I can locate the paper copy of the PST petition letter and my Facebook account doesn’t decide to vanish, losing my Redlands.edu email isn’t so bad. Maybe it just pisses me off that a private University with a $100 million dollar endowment can afford to send me requests for donations every month, yet decides that it is much too expensive to keep my poor e-mail active.

On second thought, that’s exactly what it is. F-U Redlands. You can take your Och Tamale and shove it up your Gazump. Until I get my e-mail and/or fraternity charter back I am officially going to boycott sending you any of the donations that I wasn’t planning on making in the first place. Take that Redlands, Rah, Rah, Redlands!

-dunkie