Not a single member of the Wellesley College student body has spoken to Liona Lionne ’18 in two weeks, after she ignored her email for six hours during the day. In an impressive demonstration of collaboration and organization, all the students on campus worked together to successfully ignore the Email Ignorer.
The Wellesley community has a history of standing together and taking action to make a point and then bickering about said points they’re trying to stand together to make. This point is perhaps the only point in the history of points at Wellesley that everyone can agree on: In order to remain an accepted member of the student body, one must constantly keep up with their emails.
Sources confirm that Lionne had taken a nap under a table in the art library at 6:30 p.m. on a Wednesday and slept through her alarm, the clacking of keyboards and one muffled but tear-filled phone call, dozing right until the 12:15 a.m. buzzer. In that time period, she had received approximately 325 emails, 320 of which she was expected to respond to, and five about missing OneCards. Instead, she reportedly got overwhelmed and went back to her double in Severance to snuggle with a bag of organic potato chips and work on her calculus problem set. These actions inconvenienced the rest of the student body, so an Email Shun was organized.
“It took me ten days to realize what was happening,” the First Year confessed, her eyes red from spending 50 of the last 72 hours in an isolated study room on the fourth floor of Clapp. “At first I thought it was a regular symptom of the Wellesley hustle and bustle. But then I realized that all the students had the time to at least tell each other how good the desserts are. When I told a fellow student in Stone-Davis to add a brownie to the sundae she was making and got a pained look, that’s when I realized I was being shunned.”
Email Shunning is standard practice in the Wellesley community. Records show that email shunning happens on average twice a semester. Common victims are first years, who are unaware of the sheer value given to the College’s most vital form of communication, as well as students who have spent the previous semester studying abroad, generally at a university where it is not standard practice to write “check email!!” twice a day into a weekly planner.
Various members of the student body have initiated previous Email Shunning practices in the past, but in recent years the Email Discipliner, a relatively new position in College Government has been responsible for sending out the mass emails instructing all students to ignore the Email Ignorer. Because most of the student body keeps up with emails and complies promptly to requests, the shunning generally goes smoothly.
“It’s an educational process,” explained Noura Nour ’15, the 2014-2015 Email Discipliner and a peace and justice studies major. “Most Wellesley students understand. The student ignores us collectively and messes with our flow, so we collectively ignore them and mess with their flow. Afterwards they become an incredible contributor to our flow. That, or they transfer. Good riddance, though. Am I right?”
The Shun is expected to go on for another week. Records show that previous shuns have lasted anywhere from ten days to five weeks. The Shun length allegedly depends on the severity of the initial email ignore time. An equation for shun length has been put on the agenda for the next Senate meeting.
