Don’t believe the rumors. Don’t be spoon-fed lies. This is what really happened to TU Copy.
It’s cold, but I’m safe.
I’ve outrun their flashlight beams, slinking through shadows to escape to this dark, deserted spot deep in the bowels of Keplinger.
It’s cold, but I’m safe. For now.
I have maybe three sheets of copy paper left, but I have so much to fit inside them. So much that they don’t want you to know. But you must.
This is the truth about TU Copy.
Spring semester, 2019. In the McFarlin Library, a sign where the service once stood reads, “TU Copy has been closed by the University.” Many students are confused about the decision, but not enough to ask why.
It was a sudden move. Unannounced. Unexplained. Suspicious.
But in reality, this had been in the works for a long time.
Everyone knows that the University of Tulsa is an expensive school to attend. Sixty-thousand dollars is nothing to joke about. Administration can rattle off stats about substantial financial aid packages and work-study opportunities, but that doesn’t change the fact that a lot of students struggle to make ends meet.
Mix that with having to endure the near-constant revving of luxury vehicles and watching kids from well-off families flex their wealth around campus, the pressure is on for these students to get money, sometimes by any means necessary.
That’s where TU Copy comes in.
I’m told that it all started with one such struggling student working alone at the TU Copy window. Getting ready to close up for the night, they found a crumpled $20 bill, lost by some poor soul beneath the counter. How the thought occurred to them is beyond me, but at that very moment, they decided that enough was enough. They were tired of living off canned ravioli and cereal bars, tired of being second-class citizens, tired of being poor.
They shuttered up the place, took that miracle bill to the back of the shop and did what they knew best.
They began offering this special copying service to other students who they knew were in similar financial situations. They told their friends, and those friends told their friends. These compassionately conniving students began to lift each other up in ways that the system had failed to. Overnight, their woes appeared to fade. They had been saved.
But of course, it couldn’t stay that way.
Within weeks, administration caught wind of what was going on. They could not allow it to continue. It wasn’t so much that students were counterfeiting currency on their property — it was the fact that these students were closing the disparity of wealth on campus that they had worked so hard to create. This gap fueled TU, pushing competition and filling their coffers with the funds of students that just wanted to better themselves.
The coup was silent and left no survivors. Besides myself.
So I write this now in the hope that others will hear the story of these brave students and take up their fight. The people shall rise up again. We shall discard the chains that bind us and overthrow those that only desire to see us wallow beneath their feet.
The people shall rise.
