Info Hell: An Epilogue

"Hurry! We've got to find another Academic Source!"

The completion of Info Hell has become something of a rite of passage among journalism students, and the professors have recently gotten involved as well. For years now, the official paper turn in date has consisted of the professor reading the name of every student in the class, who, when their names are read, stand up, go to the front of the classroom, and deposit their project into the turn-in box belonging to the graduate student who had been in charge of their discussion section. Having turned in the project, each student then shakes hands with the professor and is presented with a small button, which reads “I SURVIVED INFO HELL!” It is generally accepted that that button and talent will make you a very talented journalist.

In many ways, the ceremony is a lot like high school graduation – the highly boring conclusion of a horrific experience I’d much rather forget – although I doubt there are quite as many girls sobbing and hugging throughout the whole affair.

As someone who is not necessarily a fan of boring ceremonies, you could say I was lucky that I opted to turn in my paper early so I could go to the Pac-10 basketball championship in Los Angeles. I met my professor during her office hours at 9:30, handed her my paper, shook her hand, collected my button, exchanged pleasantries, and went on my way. That was the end – I leave it entirely in their hands.

I’ve talked to a lot of people about Info Hell over the past term, and it’s my opinion that just about everybody who comes to the University of Oregon starts out as a journalism major.* This is because every time I mentioned Info Hell, somebody nearby would, without fail, say “Oh, yeah, that class is why I quit being a journalism major.” In fact, I believe I wrote a column about roughly this subject some time ago. Point is, it makes me feel like sort of a badass for being able to put up with more crap than the literally hundreds of other ex-journalism majors at this school. I’m not saying it makes me better than they are or anything (I’m better than literally hundreds of people for plenty of other reasons) but it does make me feel like somebody who climbed a mountain or something. Maybe not the world’s tallest mountain, but a mountain nonetheless. Not everyone has tasted the air at the top of Mount Journalism, but I have – and it tastes just as fetid and disgusting as the air down at the bottom, with the added depression of knowing I have to climb down the other side now. Really, the only good thing about the top of Mount Journalism is that I can piss on the people on top of Mount Business (it is considerably smaller) and tell them it’s raining.

*Whenever I make a broad generalization such as this one, in which I hypothesize that all 20,000 people at my school are majoring in the same thing, I always get a deluge of comments from people calling shenanigans and self-righteously pointing out that they never started out as journalism majors or rubbed their roommate’s camera on their crotches or whatever I was talking about in that week’s generalization. Newsflash: I know. That’s the thing about comedy; it’s not always 100% factual. Telling me my impossible generalizations are incorrect is like telling a clown that it would probably be easier for him and his 30 friends to get around if they bought a bigger car.

As it turns out, though, the hardest part of the entire process wasn’t the research or the writing or the fact that at any given time I had so many Word windows and PDF files open that my processor basically ground to a halt – it was the logistics of printing my entire 104 page assignment. This is sort of embarrassing for me, because the process of printing is basically clicking and waiting as opposed to generating 104 pages of original content, suggesting some sort of motor skill deficiency on my part.

I was fortunate not to encounter any of the serious disasters that my friends did, such as Cameron “The Hammer” Shultz, whose USB flashdrive successfully deleted 13 of his annotations about a day before the project was due, throwing him into a tailspin of work, profanity, and non-bathing until he refinished his project about an hour before the due date.* My project was finished and ready to print a full 48 hours before the appointed turn-in hour, but the printing process could well have been a class in and of itself. There are about a thousand tiny elements to keep track of as you pull together 10 weeks’ worth of data to print and bind, and in a few cases, if you don’t have some of those elements you get an automatic zero on your paper.

*To continue an idea Cameron began in his blog post about the whole affair, I’ve got to say that USB flashdrives are the college equivalent of that giant alien sand pit in Return of the Jedi that Jabba wants to throw Luke into – if you never want to see your information again, by all means put it on a flashdrive. Just chuck it off of your floating hoverbarge and wave goodbye as it gets slowly devoured over the course of several thousand years, just like Boba Fett.

With the help of my intrepid roommate Josh I organized all 104 pages into a single PDF file (and by “with the help of,” I mean “Josh did everything while I gave him vague, highly critical directions”), which was a lot harder than it sounds because this process required a flashdrive to transfer files en masse from my computer to his, which is about as safe as delivering Christmas presents through a black hole, and because the Adobe program he was using refused to put the pages in the proper order unless it had been asked three times and offered a sexual favor. Fortunately, I have no shame when it comes to offering sexual favors, so the job did get done eventually, although we all felt a little less innocent once it was finished.

So I went to the J-school that night, finagled my way in through the good graces of a janitor, and printed my project on one of the free black and white printers in a photo lab. In the interests of protecting my stack of papers, I put my project into my laptop’s protective carrying case and carried my $1200 laptop under my arm. As I walked home in the light drizzle at 1:30 AM, I knew that at that point if anybody tried to mug me they were more than welcome to my laptop.

If they went for the project, though, motherfuckers were gonna die.

Truman Capps is going to major in pottery if he didn’t pass this fucking class.