Bridge Board Becomes (Even More) Unhelpful

As you walk into Stuyvesant, you will typically see a board in bright multicolored letters with useful information such as “A1 Day, Normal Schedule, etc.” for the convenience of the Stuyvesant student body. But from May 1 to June 2, you would have seen a board with completely different content. A group of two students, acting on behalf of the Stuyvesant Twits and Underperformers Association (STUA) and with the alleged consent of Dr. Gary Haber, reprogrammed the board to no longer serve such a useful purpose. The board contained all sorts of useless information, such as when the next California Zephyr train will depart Chicago Union Station; what the temperature is in Phoenix, Arizona; and the current US national debt.

Initially intended as a practical joke, Joe Weir and Woe Joaquim, the freshman masterminds behind the operation, soon began intentionally changing the messages to become increasingly useless and outlandish, such as displaying the number of nuclear warheads within a 100-mile radius of Stuyvesant or the names of every Brooklyn Tech graduate who had expired this year. The Stuyvesant student body demonstrated a high level of ignorance to the board changes, and the redundancy of the board was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Weir and Joaquim eventually proved to be incapable of performing their duties of maintenance of the board. The most outlandish information on the board was removed, and some useful information was returned to the board. With the termination of maintenance to the board, and its relatively redundancy, the board became a target for vandalism, destruction attempts, and hacks. One politically motivated hacker group within Stuyvesant changed the messages on the board to “Bill de Blasio for Congress and Tom Suozzi for Governor.” Eventually, the days of the board came to an end with its complete destruction by vandals in the middle of the night. All that was left the next morning was the board on the tiling of the second floor smashed into a quadrillion pieces and a crowbar, along with an electrical fire. The board was never replaced. It never received the state funeral that it was entitled to by law for its decades of service to Stuyvesant.