Carrel Politics: How To Lose Friends and Alienate People At The Library

Spending all your time at Van Pelt will give you a pretty skewed vision of Penn life, and spending all of that library time in the same cramped little study carrel working on a senior thesis will just make you that much more cracked out.  You get used to leaving all your stuff there, and since you have permission to kick people out when you need the carrel, it becomes a weird little makeshift home.  It's basically real estate consolation for all the stress you've elected to endure to graduate with honors.

But now the library police are trying to  take away some of that solace!  They have decreed that any books that aren't owned by Van Pelt can't be left in the carrels--for your own good.  This includes books that have been obtained through the library programs like BorrowDirect, but are not, strictly speaking, owned by the library.  According to our informant, they even employ "some sad pathetic person who goes around checking each carrel to see if any users have violated" the rules, and said person will send you a professional-yet-threatening e-mail warning you to obey VP law.  Does this mean that Van Pelt has its very own library detective, a la Mr. Bookman on Seinfeld?

Carrel-ers, keep fighting the man--the rest of us will try to stay out of your way. Here's a clip from Seinfeld: