CMU Students obsessed with new beverage craze
It's everywhere: overnight, CMU seems to have been struck by a trend taking campus by storm. Once a utilitarian beverage, water has become the hottest cold drink on campus, leaving every floor slick and a line behind every water fountain.
We attempted to interview one student partaking in the trend on the Mall. "I've started guzzling my clear sloppy style," he stated. "I'm getting it everywhere. Dripping down my chin, my chest, splashing up on my forehead, ohfuck." The student proceeded to slam back a full, dewy Nalgene of cold water, splattering it across the dry sidewalk.
We walked into Doherty Hall, where we found a student clinging desperately to a water fountain, drinking water at an alarming rate, chest pressed against the button, hair drenched and caught in the fountain's drain holes. Their mouth was pressed directly to the brass nozzle of the water fountain, lips pursed. They were almost writhing. As we stepped over them, their eyes darted toward us wildly and they grunted in surprise and pleasure.
We continued down the stairs, where we found a small cluster of students handing around a plastic bottle of Aquafina. They were loudly arguing. The topic seemed to be one participant's excessively large swig of water from the communal bottle. When her turn came around, another student lunged for the bottle instead, and the circle collapsed into a brawl. A colleague of mine pulled one battered individual off of the pile, but they immediately leapt back into the fray, desperately throwing punches and grasping for the bottle.
In Porter Hall, we found lines coming out of every restroom, and areas were demarcated with tape and biohazard signs. Apparently, as one UHS staffer told us, students were intentionally contracting cholera. "The faster I can rid my body of the water, the more I can drink," one sweat-soaked student told us. Her face was contorted in agony, but still, she took long drafts from a crumpled plastic bottle. She suddenly sprinted to the nearest restroom, leaving us holding out our microphone to a blank wall.
It's a mystery to the broader populace of Pittsburgh what caused this frenzy. Trucks of bottled water are being rerouted to Oakland, at prices far exceeding retail value. The plumbing on campus has become a bottleneck for the flow of tap water, forcing labs to switch to large drums of deionized water in lieu of plumbed H2O. Many hope the trend will die down soon, but it shows no sign of stopping, nor any clues as to its origin.
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