The ASS isn’t just a library, it’s something better

The ASS is a special place, a library like no other. It stands proudly on Tyndall Avenue and holds an important place in many a student’s heart.

Its time to talk about why.

The ASS holds no academic prejudice: Art Historian or Zoologist, all are welcome.

Like a horrible beacon of light, this brutalist edifice attracts the most whimsical of students. But what makes it so good?

Evidently the competition falls short:

Wills? Na mate, then you have to work. Life Sciences? Those weird fossils on the way down freak me out. Queen’s Library? Where the fuck is that?

The insufferable Wills library, home of people who actually work

The ASS stands above all as it’s a place you go in the hope of getting fuck all done without feeling depressed – after all, you’re in the ‘library’. In fact, this place isn’t a library, it’s a crèche for the under achievers, and its bloody brilliant.

It gets the blood pumping from the get-go.

In order to spend the whole day there you need a spot – downstairs is out of the question: you want to maintain the façade that you’re working, remember.

It’s a race upstairs to mark your territory with a classic MacBook plastered with edgy stickers in a way that’s so disorganised, it almost seems thought through.

Now you’re good to go downstairs and be the hip, social butterfly you purport to be.  If anyone asks, you’re simply taking a break – the perfect alibi.

If the enchanting concoction of being amoral, wasting your education like a badman and twenty seconds of accelerated walking doesn’t give you a thrill, I don’t know what will.

Talking of thrilling, everyone knows the ASS is full of licentious kids ready to hook up with people at the drop of the hat: students strewn joyfully over chairs, the more gregarious amongst them venturing out and mingling with multiple groups – it’s pretty much a Roman orgy, minus the vomiting due to over-eating.

That classic friend of a friend who copulated in the toilet and never saw the other person again. Who couldn’t believe that?

In reality, the most you’ll do is surreptitiously slip them your number scribbled on the back of a McDonald’s coupon and walk out feeling like Casanova.

And even after all this you still aren’t entertained then go for a smoke. There seems to be a game of who can smoke closer to the doors of the library, despite large no smoking signs.

It’s probably because smoking next to a door is basically as daring as smoking indoors, right?

Nevertheless, the absolutely exhilarating action is made crazier by being the one to get told off by the librarian.

If this happens to you, you’re a nutter. Dare I say this is only for true daredevils.

But the librarian sometimes gets a bad rap for his hard work.

We students, who are here to study rather than use university to placate some perverse identity crisis stemming from boarding school, need to respect him as the guardian of our library haven.

Thank you, Steve. I think his name is Steve.