When you get off the Queen’s Park subway stop on the north-west
corner and walk up the path to the med-sciences building there is a yellow hard
hat bolted to the ground. What is this hat? Why is it there? What does it
signify? and is there an engineering student bolted beneath it? I have been
asking around but no one seems to know.
please help
you know what an urban myth is, right? it’s one of those weird stories that gets passed around first as a rumour, then as common knowlegde. it is passed from generation to generation. it could be true, it could be made up, it could be a form of telephone…
UofT has lots of urban myths. that’s what you get when you hole up a bunch of twenty year old for 120 years. the architechs of robarts didn’t account for the weight of the books and the building is slowly sinking into the ground, at the rate of 1 cm/year. that’s the first thing i every heard about robarts. the second was that it looks like a peacock from the southeast corner. are these myths true? i don’t know, go ask your mom.
the information i am about to reveal is an unban myth. i’ve never asked an engineer about this, and it seems pretty ridiculous. but then again, this is a faculty that parades its marching band around campus at 5 a.m. shooting off canons, so you never know.
you know how frosh engineers get painted purple and wear hardhats? well, if you steal an engineer hardhat, someone will apparently buy you a 24 case of beer. i don’t know if it’s imported or domestic. so, these ingenious people have set up decoys. you are supposed to mistake that concrete hardhat for a real one, and try like an idiot to pick it up. i hope you weren’t suckered.
the engineers aren’t very good at cleaning up after themselves, i guess. that must be why their decoys are littering the queen’s park subway stop.
of course, the other urban myth i heard about the concrete hardhats was that yes, there are engineering students bolted to them. the upper years get sick of the keeners, and bury them upright in the ground. instead of sticking redhot pokers down their throats (the engineers have never been ones for worn out traditions), they simply leave them there until the ground freezes in january, then dig them up and put them on display in their student lounge.
cheers,
askastudent