We’ve always had these very aggressive Canadian geese on our campus. They leave their droppings everywhere. In the last couple of months, the administration cut the janitorial services in anticipation of the imaginary funding cuts that an administrator invented to force everybody to be “more creative.” As a result, the campus has been drowning in goose shit.
The geese have long made entering buildings on campus a difficult endeavor, especially during the mating and brooding season. They make their nests right in front of buildings and attack anybody who approaches. People have been bitten by the geese, the disabled students and faculty members have been prevented from entering the buildings, older and pregnant people have been scared out of their wits by angry creatures rushing at them.
The geese are such a burning issue that I use them whenever students stop paying attention in class. To get them involved in a discussion, I ask them to share their geese stories. Five seconds later, everybody is awake, engaged, and yelling at the top of their lungs.
This week, everybody noticed that the geese were not around. Immediately, a rumor got started that “the government” was removing the geese and killing them. Endless emails circulated, outlining the horrible scenarios of what was happening to the geese. They were slaughtered, starved to death, tortured, and killed.
I was cursing every time I had to open my university mailbox because I now needed to weed out legitimate, work-related emails from underneath the barrage of horrifying stories about tortured and persecuted geese. Gradually, the tone of the emails became extremely confrontational and descended into, “Oh, you are so egocentric” and “Would you just kill me off if I had cancer?”
Finally, “the government” responded saying that nothing has been done or will be done to the geese. They probably just left temporarily because of the tornado.
If you have been reading my “campus drama” stories, you probably understand that this announcement has done nothing to diminish the virulence of the Goose Drama debate.
Clarissa's Blog 
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