The Dingbat//

The Dingbat: My course load keeps making me spill various sauces on my computer keyboard

Because of my high course load, my laptop keyboard has become a magnet for different varieties of sauce fiending to wedge their way into every little crevice.

Sriracha? Yeah. Huy Fong makes a real virile bottle nowadays.

Coffee? Of course — that’s just thin bean sauce.

Now, let me explain.

Ever since I was accepted into the computer engineering program at UBC (81 per cent average, if you were wondering), the amount of code I have to slog through and times I have to calculate a passing grade in CPEN 221 have kept me trapped in my desk chair day in and day out.

That means that if I want to keep this enormous brain of mine chugging with some brain food, like dry crushed-up ramen or a mint Yerba Mate, I have to run and bring what I eat back to my room, and the only bearable seating is the chair at my desk.

I’m a very busy boy — I can only watch two or three Borderlands 2 speedruns while I eat and then rest from eating. I keep my eyes on the screen so that I can absorb as many details about drop rates as I can, and I raise the mustard to squeeze it onto my last slice of watermelon, and somehow I miss and squirt mustard into the deepest recesses of my 2019 MacBook Pro.

I know you’re about to say something stupid, like “Why do you keep doing this if your laptop keyboard is, at this point, one-half hardware and one-half sauce?” And to you, dumb person, I say:

Because of my course load.

My course load is so unbearable that I need to maximize my time at the computer so that I can switch seamlessly between relaxing in one tab and doomscrolling GitHub in another. I eat the food I need to subsist, and that often involves sauces and watching Elon Musk talk about ethereum or whatever I’m into.

So, before you ask more ridiculous questions, I ask you: do you eat dinner with your loved ones? Do you do an easy degree, like civil engineering, where you have time to go out and consume sauces away from your computer screen? If not, check your high-key-velocity privilege, and get out of my mentions.

The Dingbat is The Ubyssey’s humour section. You can send pitches or completed pieces to blog@ubyssey.ca.