Late in the first year of the Harpoon, some time in the second half, anyway, and certainly after the War Issue was published, the Harpoon got itself some designated office space from Student Life. At that time in the history of things, these offices were located on the main floor of the Kirkhoff Center, with a wide bank of windows overlooking the pond, and the book bunker beyond.
The office space was just a six-foot-wide length of desk space, set in the middle of a cubicle garden, sandwiched between the assigned desks of two organizations who, if they had ever come in to use them, seemed to have stopped when the Harpoon was installed in their midst; it was nothing more than a few drawers, a phone, as many rolling chairs as we could commandeer, and an overhead bin. The only things the Harpoon had, in the way of office equipment, was a phone book. The records, the ones the U cared about, were stored at the other end of the building, safe from staffers. The documents which were important stayed in the publisher’s apartment.
About all the office was good for was for certain high-level members to make a lot of noise, and to spy on the Greek Round Table. There was one member who fit under the desk, or in the overhead bin, depending. It was always best to enter the office space at the safe end of a yardstick, while probing–not so gently–with the other end into cravasses. Where the pumas live.
Once a co-founder told a blonde lies about the Beatles, a band about which she was kind enough to pretend for twenty minutes to not know anything. Another co-founder created and strategized a political campaign from the office. And one day several members got bad news about their respective love lives in the office.
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