All day, err’day, I collect the souls of mortals. Sometimes, they die. Sometimes, they decide to sell it to me. It’s dull and dreary work, but once in a while, a soul presents itself that is both interesting and frightening to behold. These souls are offered to me every four months from a distinct type of student at the University of Waterloo; they are the Editors of the Iron Warrior. They are crazy enough to study Engineering at Waterloo and they are also stupid enough to accept this position. From the steady stream of idiots to pass through the Hell (so to speak) that is being an EIC, I’ve categorized the souls of these misguided dumbasses into categories.
Rambling Overachiever
This particular specimen is an overachiever in the sense that he demonstrated his prowess and became the Editor in their 2A term. More commonly known as the ‘Leeroys’, these editors have a distinct aptitude for getting ‘er done but they forgot to ask for a couple of things when giving up their souls. They forgot to ask for the ability to write. Their sentences don’t flow; in fact, they don’t even pretend to flow. These men (yes, they are all men) asked for the divine ability to layout; however, they forgot to ask for ‘Engrish’ skills. They so bad that they make me sad. For one particular EIC, he should have asked for an walnut cracker. True story, bro.
You mad, bro?
In public, they’re sweet and cute and oh so snuggly. Behind the closed doors of the IW cave, it’s a very different story. These EICs are known to bruise it and lose it. They defenestrate things, they bitchslap little girls, and they yell at babies. More often than not, they employ the Imprint to smack their subordinates upside the head and to threaten death when articles don’t arrive on time. More scary is their look of serenity when these actions take place. You think they’re happy when they’re smiling…but they’re not. They resemble the Joker with his perpetual smile which hides their capacity to demolish any self-respect or dignity you had. Most importantly, these EICs are master delegators given their aptitude in scaring the ‘bejeezus’ out of you. They don’t actually do much and feign business by having ‘assignments’ and ‘homework’ and ‘all the FYDP things.’ Whatever you do, don’t anger it.
Do you even layout?
While the Overachievers bask in the glory of their Tetris-master-like newspaper spreads, these EICs are noobs when it comes to layout. They are known to forget stroke weights on pictures, have character spacing in the positive or negative fifties (which ends up rivaling Madonna’s gap teeth when it comes to spaces in words), and consistently ‘forgetting’ to put articles in the paper. These people also can’t line text up with the border or remove the extra black space in the byline. Weirdly enough, they are loners and love to shut themselves up alone in the IW Office (with our without pants on – I wouldn’t know) and attempt to layout. Come Sunday night, they’re still not done and are starting to stink from failing to leave the room and do menial things like shower and eat. Thankfully for them, they can write. Unfortunately, they usually write crap; I remember one EIC writing 1500 words about fonts…yeah, it was exhilarating. Also, they love to place random and useless pictures for no reason (because newspapers are like picture books…) since they haven’t planned ahead to account for the fact that they two blank pages to fill with something; anything usually goes for them. They also swear by Macs; just sayin’.
That pretty much sums it up until I encountered the fourth kind of EIC recently. This one couldn’t ask for anything from me because he had no soul to barter with. It’s probably because he’s a ginger (and everyone knows that gingers have no souls).
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