Can I have everyone please remove their backpacks and make room for the hot fudge?
This week, UC Davis students voted on the Unitrans Referendum, a piece of student legislation allowing for Unitrans to maintain and improve its services. “All funds raised will be used to pay for wages associated with the increasing minimum wage, bus maintenance, fuel, and all the other stuff that keeps the buses moving,” according to the Unitrans website. At the time of this article’s publication, the referendum will have either passed or failed to pass. And it may be too late.
Whatever the result, there’s something everyone should know: Unitrans encoded a secret message in the fine print of the referendum detailing several changes to the original.
This must raise a few questions for you. How do I know this? How is this possible? Why should I care if I never take the bus? The answer to all these questions is the same: I’m from the future, here to warn you about the fate of UC Davis and, possibly, the world. So you should take what I’m saying as seriously as you can. Do not pay attention to the “Humor” title. That was just to ensure that agents of Unitrans wouldn’t look past the headline. Now listen closely, because there’s little time before they send me back.
Now, I will admit, some of these last-minute additions sound pretty amazing. As I said in the headline, eject buttons. If you need to get off the bus early or miss your stop, every seat will now have an eject button allowing a passenger’s seat to extend out the side of the bus and shoot that passenger into the air with a parachute. No more waiting for Mouth-Breather McGee to move out of your way. No risk of missing class when the bus is late.
As I also mentioned, the sundae bars seem particularly sweet. After a hard midterm, treat yourself to a hot-fudge sundae with any topping you want. Whipped cream. Caramel. Many nut varieties. Don’t forget the cherry! The best part — it’s refilled every hour with fresh ice cream made from the milk of UC Davis cows and compostable utensils.
There’s more: live musicians of different genres for every week day; bowling alleys on the top deck of every double decker; changes of dry clothes for rainy days in all sizes. “Sounds great!” and “Wowee, you said this is bad, weird future man” are two thoughts that likely crossed your mind reading this.
Well it is bad, and I’ll tell you why. The referendum states that all funding will come from student tuition. That includes everything I just listed and more. Imagine tuition more than doubling just so Unitrans can have their way. But the worst of it comes in the final line, stating that Unitrans now has “unlimited control over the actions and lives of [their] riders.” As a future Davis denizen, I can assure you, they take full advantage of this. Let’s just say there are only a few of us left fighting the good fight.
However, there’s a way you can stop all of this from happening. All you have to do is —.
Written by: Conner Shaw — cjshaw@ucdavis.edu
(This article is humor and/or satire, and its content is purely fictional. The story and the names of “sources” are fictionalized.)
