Editor’s Note: The piece below was published in The Weekly’s 2020 “Joke Issue.” All content, quotations, and other features are entirely fictitious. 

Senior Rohan Jain gazed out a second-floor alcove window overlooking the courtyard. He clenched his fist until his knuckles whitened. After repeating this exercise seven times, he inhaled and exhaled in short intervals, before lying down on the hickory piano bench, sulking while analyzing the fine cracks in the tiled ceiling. “Everybody Hurts” played on repeat in his head. In front of the piano, a group of sophomore boys huddled in a circle blubbering, while junior Spencer O’Brien, from 20 feet away, traced the boys’ teardrops as they slowly descended down their reddened faces onto the graphite carpet.

Jain and O’Brien, like a majority of Parker middle and high school students, have been sleeping at Parker after school since the Uber employee strike began on Monday, March 16. The strike led to the shutdown of the application, forcing Parker students whose parents cannot pick them up to either take public transportation home, use Lyft, walk, or remain in the school building. Seventy-five percent of students have elected to stay at Parker, causing the administration to call for the construction of dorm rooms, which, according to Principal Dan Frank, will not be able to accommodate students until early May. In the meantime, students are sleeping in sleeping bags scattered around the school.

When Jain first found out about the strike, he screamed. “The only time I ever panicked more was last month when my Uber driver tried to start a conversation with me,” Jain said. “What have I done to deserve this?”

In the immediate aftermath of the news break, CTA-related apocryphal stories circulated the student body. “I can’t believe these awful stories about the CTA,” Jain said. “I heard that one time someone had to wait over ten minutes for a train. Also, someone told me that once they had to stand.”

Jain is also concerned about the convenience of public transit. “There’s no stop called ‘Rohan’s house,’” Jain said. “How I am supposed to know where to get off? Also, the door doesn’t even wait for you.”

Junior O’Brien shares Jain’s concern but has the experience to support his unwillingness to take public transportation. “I once sat on a bus downtown, and an elderly woman demanded that she sit down in my seat,” O’Brien said. “Why are people so selfish? It’s people like her I’m afraid of.”

While Jain and O’Brien both live over five minutes away from Parker via public transit, senior Sean Andrews is only a thirty-second walk away from school. “I can’t walk home,” Andrews said. “What if I’m robbed? What if I pull a muscle? What if my GPS shuts down?”

Frank came to the conclusion that only two options remained: shuttling students home on Infinity Buses or building dorm rooms. “I landed on the second option because it solved another problem,” Frank said. “In the past, we could only shelter students while school is in session. Now, we can keep them isolated from the outside world all day and all night.”

According to Frank, the parent reception has been overwhelmingly positive. “The biggest compliment we’ve received is for our plan to build a GPS to help students find their way out of their dorm room beds every morning,” Frank said. “I can’t leave my office for more than two minutes without being bombarded with plaudits.”

Because the construction company has not yet completed the dorm rooms, students have had to sleep in sleeping bags, a situation that has engendered daily insurrections. “Most of our security resources have gone into suppressing student revolts,” Frank said. “Fortunately, to describe their conditions, the students learned a new word: squalor.”