If I Ruled The Union…

JOHN WAYTE lets us know what changes REALLY need to be made on campus.

| UPDATED

With the Leadership Race coming to a close, I find myself reflecting on what could have been if I’d just bitten the bullet and subjected myself to 3 weeks of:

  • Putting up posters
  • Defacing my bed sheets
  • Making highly unrelated promo videos
  • Emailing every society under the sun
  • Attending hundreds of socials and committee meetings
  • Whoring out my facebook
  • Learning how to use twitter

… and ultimately building myself up for a very public and humiliating fall from grace if it didn’t pay off.

Chances are, all that effort would have been for nothing when we consider that ultimately 95% of those that cast a vote base it entirely on the candidate’s name and slogan. With a name like John Wayte, I was understandably put off; it would have been challenging to twist it into some kind of uplifting message.

However, after much consideration, I’d have gone with John ‘The Great Wayte Shark’; handing out fake fins, sliming on hockey girls and Jaws-themed promo films would have all built up the persona.

On top of this I would have entered all the union debates to the theme music ‘Baby there’s a shark in the water’ by VV Brown.

If this failed to bag me the election there-and-then, I’d be confident that my policies would be able to do the rest of the talking.

We all know that the crux of the leadership race is your policies, and it would be ludicrous to suggest it might be down to your breadth of friends, how fit you look on your campaign poster or whether you can neck a bottle of tequila or not. Luckily 2 out of these wouldn’t be a problem for me.

Every candidate seems to think that running for a handful of policies is the thing to do, but seriously, if you’re going to get a 16k job for a year and hope to only achieve three things, I’m just not interested.

I, on the other hand, would have proposed a plethora of policies:

  • No pull handles on push doors.
  • A less feminist approach to toilets in Eddy B.
  • No ‘Cleaners Only’ plug sockets – when have you ever seen a cleaner using one?
  • Stop announcements that the Library is about to close – ‘The library is about to close’ 3 times in the last 45 minutes is excessive and irritating.
  • Translations of the silent zone signs into Cantonese and Mandarin.
  • Save trees by scrapping the union paper. Each week a small forest is cut down to print it and no-one’s picking it up anyway.
  • A terrace lunch which you could actually describe as lunch.
  • Improved staff timetable in essentials. 20 person queues at lunchtime for 3 tills just isn’t on my agenda.
  • Ban people peppering me with flyers on the walk into the union – I don’t want to have to think about how to avoid the main entrance/pretending I’m on the phone to walk in.
  • Turn the radiators in Uni on in winter and off in summer.
  • Turn the music down in Terrace in the daytime – I’ve come for Lunch, not to party.
  • Designated ‘loner’ tables in Terrace so my group of four doesn’t have to give that one person the death-stare.

And what with us now paying an extra six grand a year for the same facilities, I’d have a few bigger, more sweeping policies:

  • A slip and slide outside the Union.
  • Bunk beds in halls
  • A Travelator from Hyde Park to Uni.
  • Modules in Fifa 13 and cigarette rolling. (Sports science modules of course)
  • A BNOC fast track aisle in Terrace.
  • Rocky music in the library foyers.
  • Rather than Wednesdays free, no lectures before 11.
  • A body shot bar in Terrace, with a student voted body to be the vessel each week.
  • The Union Jazz Band on call to follow you home from one night stands.
  • A giant black board outside the Union, what with all the chalk artists now coming out of the woodwork.

Unfortunately, what with the elections now being closed, it’s unlikely you’ll see these on campus next year. I guess we’ll just have to… Wayte.