You Can Take Our Lives, But You'll Never Take Our Ping Pong

We know it's finals week, and everyone is stressed and needs to study, but that's no excuse for monopolizing your law school's ping-pong table…

Law school finals are just starting for some of you, and they are wrapping up for others, but at least the end is within sight. It’s a stressful time to be sure, and different people use different strategies to stay sane. Some schools employ therapy dogs (or llamas), some students go on Adderall benders. At one Midwestern law school, they play ping pong.

But what happens when a student goes rogue and co-opts the school’s communal ping pong table for studying? Uh-oh, people better watch out or someone might get hurt….

The following email was sent yesterday afternoon to the student body at the University of Cincinnati College of Law — from none other than the president of the William Howard Taft Table Tennis Consortium:

Dear students,

It has come to my attention that someone has commandeered the ping pong room for use as a study room. The ping pong room is meant as an outlet for stress, and this is all the more important during exam week. Please be considerate of other students and use classrooms, study rooms, the library, and other areas for studying.

Thanks,
[Pong Master McGee]
President, William Howard Taft Table Tennis Consortium
University of Cincinnati College of Law
J.D. Candidate 2013

First, what an awesome job title! How fun would it be to have that on your résumé? If nothing else, it would be a good conversation starter. (How did President Taft get his name attached to the consortium?) Second, although I was momentarily tempted to judge these ping pong enthusiasts for being hypersensitive, I realized that back when I was in college, ping pong was a significant source of stress relief for a lot of my friends and me (marathon Guitar Hero sessions were up there, also).

I may or may not have lived in a fraternity house for a while (shhh, don’t tell anyone), where we had a ping pong table. The game was surprisingly important to our collective mental health. On the rare occasions someone decided to stack boxes on the table or make it otherwise unusable, people started to lose their sh*t quickly. I mean, if you have ever watched serious ping pong players — it is not a gentle game. There is a lot of anger going on there. And come on, these guys are in Cincinnati. What else do they have to do for fun?

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Although I might fear for the culprit’s safety here from the ranging table tennis hordes, I’ve got to give him credit for being completely unashamed about what he did. Check out the next page for the unapologetic student’s Facebook status, as well as pictorial evidence of the horror of outlines and study books he unleashed upon the communal table tennis arena….

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