I just had the most delightful conversation with Louise Chamberlin of Axillary services. As you may know, the Chemistry Club has been selling
lab books as a fund raiser for some time. Ms. Chamberlin believes that
this is a violation of the schools contract with Follet. She asked that
we sell out our current stock, and then work with the her and Follet to
create some cooperative alternative. In addition, there is some worry
that our selling refreshments in the chemistry club lounge may collide
with a contract with a new candy vendor that is coming to Tech soon.
This change in the way things are being handled bothers me, because we
approach a slippery slope; Taken to the logical extreme, we shouldn't be
allowed to sell any form of food on campus because chartwells has an
exclusive contract as well. What about t-shirts and stickers? Can the
physics department sell books? What about the 5 (maybe 4 now) CRC books
in the chemistry office? Will the Socorro library be allowed to do it's
annual book sale on campus? Can we sell our books to our friends on
campus?
Ms. Chamberlin said that she would be talking with the Follet
representative about this soon. There is some probability of some kind
of meeting between her, the club and follet to arrange something that
will be acceptable to them (we see no reason to change.... why is this a
problem now and not when we started 5 years ago?). It occurs to me that
any sort of arrangement would be viewed as a president for future
arrangements that would affect other clubs and students, and that this
issue (by way of this letter) should at least be brought to your
attention.
Thanks for the time and energy you put into the SA.
Karl Haase
Chemistry Club Secretary/Webmaster
Climbing Club President
Caving Club Vice-President
The real story behind this, as far as I can see, is that Auxillary Services has some weird machiavellian agenda that involves giving student money to large corporations in exchange for good backrubs and the occasional free soda. They discovered that we were selling books, and they're legal council instantly lost bladder control and screamed that they should make it stop. Hence my discussion and hence the letter.
Further discussion with people around the department reveals that the bookstore has had no problems with us selling stuff in the past as long as it wasn't the
Further thought yeilds the surprising fact that there is nothing they can do to stop us. They can't sue us... they'd just loose money and piss off students. They have no clout. Just big mouths. And I have to be nice to them.
My grand plan is to waffle. Oliver will tell you that I am a master waffler, able to stave off even the easiest of tasks for days or months with petty little important projects that must be done first, then with the union-required coffee breaks. The with some emergency repair to some piece of hardware somewhere that no one cares about anyway. They can be made to wait months and be forced to put up with accidental road block after road block to get to me. Then, i'll schedule the meeting when I have a bad case of the flu or turrets syndrome or something. I'll also eat a lot of fiber for several days before hand, and those 0.25$ bean burritos for breakfast. I'll also speak slowly for once in my life. The combination of biological and psychological warfare should lull them into a sense of urgency that I can use to get them to believe that we are harmless and go away.... or maybe i'm off one one of my wild fantasies again.
I think that they might well forget about it. If I ever do actually meet with them. I will point out that we sell about 25 per semester. The book store is probably loosing on the order of 25$ on lab books, which is less money than they will have wasted in trying to hunt me down to meet me. I will also point out that the club is not an easy group to control (heck, we can't even get people to come to the meetings) and that there may be some trouble in getting us to do or not do anything at all. Unless there's free food involved.
9-20-04