PENCILS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

This week's Dartboard is dedicated to the memory of thousands of lumber worker's jobs.

Teaching fellows told students who filled out the Committee on Undergraduate Education's (CUE) response forms in Moral Reasoning 22 ("Justice") on Thursday that they would not need to use a No. 2 pencil. Hundreds of souls rejoiced in the recognition of revolutionary science as they whipped out their ball-point pens.

But we at Dartboard do not rejoice. This mysterious new technology for recording marks could reach into our public schools, where tens of millions of students take standardized tests every year. No more rolls of needle-sharp pencils for those kids--it's BYOEP (bring your own erasable pen) if you think you'll make mistakes.

With the obsolescence of the No.2 pencil, one of this nation's major industries will certainly collapse. Graphite production will disappear except for the minuscule amounts needed for lock lubricants. Lumber yards will fall silent as thousands of glistening yellow and blue No.2 pencils with their red rubber erasers sit idly on stationers' shelves.

But the problem doesn't end with pencils and pens. Soon, all those lap-top-pushers (the ones whose faces are lit up by an cerie bluish glow in lecture) will want to fill out their CUE Guide forms on disk. Fortunately, that day won't come until we're all safely out of graduate school.

There's only one help for the pencil trade. We must conceal this advancement in mechanical tabulation from developing nations that still rely heavily on No.2 pencils! We'll keep them in the dark ages until some industrial spy manages to squeeze the secret out of a less-than-scrupulous CUE Guide worker. By that time, we'll have switched all those pencil-producers over to defense contracting.