Help! I think they’re coming after me now, or cursing me? It was hard to tell when the zoom lag kept messing up their repetitive chanting. I knew I should never have joined my first-year mentor group weekly meetings, but after three weeks of ignoring the daily emails, each one began to send me awash in the guilt of being complicit in making my mentor’s life a nightmare. Come to think of it, maybe that was the curse in action already.
Either way, I decided to join the zoom meeting yesterday, and was met with the simultaneous cackling of each one of my group members. Our mentor kindly explained to me that Stanford quickly realized grouping people based on location and pushing them into a zoom room together wasn’t enough to make them instantaneous friends, so they had to come up with better bonding activities. Each group drew lots to pick their activity, and apparently mine got “culthood.” Why couldn’t I have been part of the group that just started an Only Fans together?
I don’t know if they all had a special virtual background, or everyone in my group could just do that, but each one of my group members’ eyes suddenly turned red and began to glow. They berated me for not knowing about their growing cult membership – apparently this was carefully outlined in the 70-page document titled “RESOURCES” that our mentor shared with us last week. For my insolence, they explained, I would be sacrificed to the Supreme Leader. This is when the chanting began, but just at that moment my wi-fi began to cut out. By the time I connected to my phone hotspot, their shouts had died down to whispers, and I was kicked from the meeting.
I don’t think I have much time left. I can see the shadows in the corner begin to grow. I — Where am I? Why am I wearing a Stanford shirt? Go Bears!
