In the spirit of lamenting the scarcity of on-campus office supplies, I am reminded of that time two weeks ago when I had joyfully crafted a dazzling lab report on local deciduous tree species. My report was stunningly riddled with the burning images of crimson leaves and autumnal gold and goldfish-orange canopies. I gleefully skipped to the nearest print lab with the bursting gumption of a kid with crayons and blank paper. My world was so color-filled! So it felt a real blow when I got to the print lab and remembered: Oooooooooooh, right . . . we don't have color printing. Dejected, and my head hung low, I was forced to settle for a much duller lab report of greytones and sadness.
Ok, so no free color printing is not the end of the world. We do have color printing ability here on campus, but you have to go through the process of buying print dollars and, if I've learned anything about protocals and processes here at Columbia, it's that they are generally as much fun as sanding your toenails. It's also $1 per color page. I mean, my big, public, midwestern high school of 2,000 students (which is a combination of traits oft deemed inferior by some in coastal, smaller, prep-school academia) allowed us 20 free color pages a semester, and then only a dime a page after that. Suddenly, $1 per color page seems too much.
