By: Rafiq Habib
On September 3rd and 4th, thousands of us frosh swarmed onto campus, eager to start a new chapter in our lives. We were overwhelmed by the new people, new friends, and new food, and excited to finally be adults doing adult(ish) things.
But everything – our pride, our eagerness, our hopes – all came to a sudden, crashing halt when we received our WATCARDs.
Many of us had waited in line for hours, focused on getting our new, permanent “membership” to the University of Waterloo, our first piece of campus swag and a lasting legacy of our time here. However, instead of our happy, eager faces on the ID cards, in our fingers – still warm from the instant printing – a horror glared back at us. Twisted and perverted by the bad lighting and the awkward shadows, every imperfection on our faces leapt to life in terrifying low resolution and sent fear into our hearts.
What had we done to deserve such a fate, to be cursed by such a tortuous depiction of our identity? Had we displeased EDCOM? Was this a sick frosh orientation joke? Was it to reinforce that we could never be Chads?
And to make matters worse, this caricature followed us to out midterms! What a way to start an exam: with our facial flaws staring back at us in unforgiving black and white as we read over the instructions of a make-or-break-the-term assessment.
But perhaps the most terrible of all is that the university gives us the option to reprint the WATCARD if we “lose” it. That’s right, for $30 – slightly too much for a broke university student to be forking over for a piece of plastic that isn’t a fake ID (but a laughably low price once you realize that Waterloo only values your dignity and self-worth at $30) – we can roll the dice on a new picture and pray that the photo gods have mercy. Until we reach that point (and we all will), we have no choice but to slog on, and curl up in an attempt to hide whenever the cashier asks how we want to pay and we slowly hand them over our WATCARD.
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