This weekend, the Pittsburgh Consortium of Independent Schools, or POKEMON, Spring College Fair was in town. Representatives from over eighty schools piled into the most academy building west of the Ohio River—the Shadyside Academy hockey rink—to celebrate this past Earth Day by giving each student seven metric tons worth of pamphlets.

One representative said, “We were thinking about giving them six metric tons, but it didn’t feel like enough. We were thinking about giving them eight, but other people thought it was overkill. So we settled on seven. It was cool. I was really pulling for eight, but seven is good. Not everyone has the grindset like me.”

Each university had their own table, where they would talk to prospective students about campus and pass out information about their schools. The fair was two hours, so if a student stayed for an hour-and-forty-five minutes, visited a school every fifteen minutes counting both time in-line and conversation, and received a single metric ton of pamphlets and brochures at each table, they could easily reach seven metric tons during the course of the fair.

“The most important aspect of fairs like these is making sure students know everything about us—our majors, our student/faculty ratio, our acceptance rate, our ethnicity breakdown, our nobel laureates, attendance at our last kickball game, the general vibe around the computer science offices, whether our dean would be cool at a party, the dominant astrology sign on campus, who killed Kennedy, how we had a hand in killing Kennedy, how we tried to kill Reagan, how dissapointed we were that we didn’t Reagan, how glad we later were that we didn’t kill Reagan, how little we liked Reagan way later, and how we’re not like other schools.”

Another rep said, “Our students are the future. The future is our students. And the future we’re conceiving here at Kalma is not one that involves trees. Our pamphlets are just too important. They’re vital. And who really likes trees? It’s not like we’re making the pamphlets out of Saharan white-tailed mongooses. Mongooses? Mongeese? Who knows. I’ll look up the answer later and put it in a pamphlet. But really. They’re trees. Who cares?” 

An anonymous rep from a school known for a world-renowned environmental science program said, “I don’t want to be wasting that much paper. I know most students only look at them maybe once before tossing them into some pile that’s tucked far away from sunlight never to be used again. The problem is that the year we tried to do lighter— more streamlined pamphlets, we stocked fewer, and we only gave them to people who asked for one—one of the students I offered it to stared at it for a second, looked at me, and then dumped a bag of fertilizer on my head and said, ‘this pamphlet doesn’t even tell me how little you liked Reagan way later, you hippie.’ But it did still say how little we liked Reagan way later. They just didn’t give us a chance.”

Regardless of what controversy may occur, it is unlikely things will change. The opaque, old-money powers that be wanted the system to be flooded with this much paper. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s not to mess with the shadowy, unaccountable, nefarious Climate Changers.