British University I: The Trouble with Sloanes (943 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 1.33 on 11 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Magicaddict (View user info) at 2004-04-15 06:36:09 EDT
Before I start, I will put a disclaimer on this that a) I'm British, so feel free to abuse, and b) the three years I spent as an undergraduate at Bristol University were an absolute joy. I realise some people don't feel the same way (sorry it didn't work out and good luck with the future), so gratuitous flouncing off about how cool it was will be kept to a minimum.
However, gratuitous flouncing off about how annoying people can be there is on open season.
For three years, I managed the bar at my hall of residence, so I got to meet approximately one thousand eighteeen year olds, most of whom were testing the waters of codefiedly independant legal drinking and going out for the first time. I signed up for the bar management basically because it was a good way of getting back into halls (usually one year was the most you could hope for before being thrown out/asked to find somewhere in the private sector), and being a closeted and...well...pathetic individual at the time, I thought that staying out of the real world was a good plan. On average, I was right.
However, It mean that I had to deal with the Wills Hall sloanes.
Wills had a reputation around the university of being the posh hall - where all the lords and ladies of the land sent their children who had failed to get into Oxford or Cambridge. Unfortunately, they were right. Of three hundred and fourty people, about fifty each year would be from this particular social bracket.
On meet and greet day, they could easily identified thus:
1. The pink, red or baby blue pashmina that engulfed the neck and resembled a homicidal teddy bear attempting a strangling.
2. Realising with indignance that the returning students meeting them weren't porters, and following up by asking incredulously where they could be found.
3. The pink shirt-wearing method involving the back hanging out, the cuffs undone and the collar turned up, like they were some kind of militant gothic antithesis.
4. The opening line upon meeting someone, rather than being "Hi, I'm Steve", or a sheepish "Hi, I'm...across the corridor" being "Where did you get your jumper, darling?"
5. Realising with further indignance that there were no lifts in the building (built in 1929), and wondering how on earth they would get their stuff up to their rooms. Stairs, apparently, had been supplanted by more modern conveniences in their own homes.
This, you will probably find yourself saying, isn't that bad. Only a handful of them - I could put up with that. Well, yeah, they weren't so bad in small doses. However, small doses were woefully few and far between in the midst of the weasling method they had of inserting themselves into all kinds of places where they really weren't wanted.
The hall bar was a beautiful wood panelled room, still with a lot of the 1929 look, with tastfully arranged tables and leather sofas. People could come in there and enjoy a drink by themselves or with friends, play pool, darts or listen to the free jukebox.
That is, of course, until Jonny Loadsamoney dived in and did something stupid. For instance:
A sloane decided to demonstrate how cool he was one day by jumping up onto the pool table (forcibly interrupting a game that two normal people had paid for), getting out his mobile penis substitute, calling his parents and telling them in a voice that could be heard half a mile away about just how common life is at Wills. Is this normal behaviour? Am I simply being up tight in thinking that someone vandalising both a game of pool and the table it is played on, and following up by mouthing off at how crap everyone is, is being a bit of a bastard? I considered banging his head repeatedly against the table, but found myself doing that before I could stop myself.
Another example:If you've just come last in a "Most desirable man" competition, and for some reason best known to yourself are wearing a only skirt and nothing on your top half, is it wise to pick a fight with the chairman of the student council, who is probably the hardest guy in the hall? Or is that really cool? Does it make you more of a man to start shouting at the top of your voice at someone you barely know? Or does it make you a complete fuckwit?
However, these clearly weren't enough. One-man idiocy, it seemed, was deemed mundane and commonplace. To be exceptional, it had to be a group effort.
Enter a drinking game known as 100 Shots - in which one shot of beer must be drunk every minute for a hundred minutes, without a toilet break (the equivalent of just over seven and a half Buds - it's going to hurt). However, the toilet break rule could be relaxed if the victim submitted themselves to a forfeit agreed by the rest of the players/hangers on. Reasonable, you may think, and very much preferable as a manager to having someone have an accident in the bar, until you remember who's dishing the forfeits out. Now, I've seen this game played by normal people - they had a great laugh, did stupid forfeits, and didn't annoy me in the slightest. Why? There was someone there keeping an eye out for the other patrons, and for me. Any ideas that might have really annoyed other people were quickly quashed, at no detriment whatsoever to the game. The sloanes had no such safety net, so the guys were regularly doing forfeits like urinating on our quadrangle, stippping naked in the bar and kissing me - I'm no homophobe, but I don't find men attractive.
The coup de grace, however, came in the form of a guy called Tim, who was dared to jump over the bar. The sight of me looking unimpressed (usually an object of ridicule) did nothing to stop him, and he would have made it over had it not been for the beer taps in the way, which he proceeded to crash into and dislodge from their anchor, in the process puncturing one of the beer lines. Lo, and behold! Beer starts pouring out all over the floor, and continues to do so until the bar steward dives downstairs and disconnects the barrel. The sloanes proceed to find causing this criminal damage hilariously funny, and continue to do so until they are banned from the bar forthwith. Protests were numerable, the main thrust of them being their inability to understand what they had done wrong - it was youthful high spirits, just having some fun, didn't mean to cause trouble - they were being banned because the manager is a bastard. Incorrect, fuckwits, and I have documentation to prove it. Get it right - I'm not a bastard, I'm an asshole, and I don't like you.
I simply don't understand what makes these people tick. They seem to exist on some different plane of the universe, where the size of your bank balance somehow makes you a different species from other people, and gives you the right to do incomparably stupid things like walk into a MacD and laugh at the staff for being what they are, or walk into my bar and do the same thing. Fuck you guys - you are the the rudest, most pathetic, useless bunch of oxygen thieves I have ever had the misfortune of knowing. Go shove your cash where not even you could afford to bribe the sun to shine.
User Reviews
Submitted by redskieslookfake (user info) at 2006-10-10 09:04:22 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by Staccers (user info) at 2004-04-29 15:30:32 (#)
Ranking: -2
you proletariat fuck. live in poverty see if i care. if the whole i-dont-like-rich-people-because-im-poor thing dosent work - you can be my stable-lad. you even get a uniform.
From an INSULTINGLY wealthy SLOANE at DURHAM UNIVERSITY.
you shits.
---
Yeah - you're a cunt.
Submitted by Staccers (user info) at 2004-04-29 15:30:32 EDT (#)
Ranking: -2
you proletariat fuck. live in poverty see if i care. if the whole i-dont-like-rich-people-because-im-poor thing dosent work - you can be my stable-lad. you even get a uniform.
From an INSULTINGLY wealthy SLOANE at DURHAM UNIVERSITY.
you shits.
Submitted by Magicaddict (user info) at 2004-04-29 15:12:37 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
Closeted = Sheltered upbringing.
Submitted by smokymtcsw (user info) at 2004-04-29 15:07:52 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
So sloanes is british slang for rich mongs? Nice. Good story, I just did not understand if you were closeted why you were not gay? What does closeted mean in England?
Submitted by jb (user info) at 2004-04-15 09:51:08 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
ha ha, poor fucker. Went to Bath myself, which seemed to have a few nonces of its own. Sympathy mate.
Submitted by Magicaddict (user info) at 2004-04-15 07:22:05 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
Then you probably heard about me. I was there 2000-2003.
Submitted by Philst82 (user info) at 2004-04-15 07:16:11 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
2 years ago recently.
Submitted by Magicaddict (user info) at 2004-04-15 07:13:03 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
You were in Badock? When? Are we talking recently?
Submitted by digsy (user info) at 2004-04-15 07:12:28 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by Trout (user info) at 2004-04-15 07:08:22 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
But that's how all students act, not just the rich ones.
Fucking students.
Submitted by Philst82 (user info) at 2004-04-15 07:05:00 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
Nice work, I know exactly what you're talking about. I used to be in Badock Hall at Bristol, and it has its fair share of the sloanes, so if rumours are true I can only imagine what Wills is like.