By Claire G.
If I’m being completely honest, I expected the day to proceed like the ordinary Thursday — filled with work and slightly awkward Zoom bonding. Instead, the day turned out to be quite the opposite.
As a late block participant, my day started out with campus block. During this Zoom session, group 8 proposed an activity where each person would go around their house to find three objects: food, a pet or something meaningful, and a picture. My breakout room included both Sais — Sai R from Iowa and Sai K from California. When Sai R presented, he brought out a bottle of sriracha and explained that he enjoyed drinking sriracha as opposed to water. At first, I assumed he was joking. Little did I know that when asked, he would actually drink the hot sauce on camera. As a fellow Iowan, I must say that Sai had an interesting way of representing kids from the state.
Sai drinking sriracha certainly set up campus block to be the most unexpected event of the day, but the late TA block by far brought along the most chaotic affairs. Before I get into what happened, I would like to put a small disclaimer that much of the following content is a joke, and in no way shape or form should Sai K be canceled any more than he already is.
Anyways, TA block started out quietly until Sai K popped into our breakout room. Instead of politely acknowledging all of the four members in the room, Sai entered and only greeted Alex, while ignoring Mackenzie, Charis, and me. Normally, I wouldn’t really care, but multiple people in the past few days have raided our breakout room, mainly to only talk to Alex (refer to Charis’ blog post for more info). Yet, the biggest flaw about Sai’s behavior, which led to his first cancelation, was that he assumed that Alex had a) done the activity and b) known the answers (it was later found out that Alex did the activity wrong). Interestingly enough, I was the only person in the group who could help Sai.
Usually, canceling Sai would occur only once. However, there were many more offenses that led to other SSP participants canceling him repeatedly. The reasons are as follows:
- Ignoring women in STEM (the three girls in my group)
- Disrespecting elders (me and Mackenzie, as we are older than him)
- Gaslighting (trying to convince us that the situation never happened)
- Redirecting attention after he was canceled (to other guys who had previously raided us)
- Making excuses for only asking Alex (saying they were besties and referring to past interactions)
- Calling me a loser (for not watching Marvel movies)
The next notable moment during TA block happened while groups 7, 9, and 11 sat in a breakout room together. While chilling in the room, Andrew’s zoom froze for an extremely long time. Seizing the opportunity, Rishabh took a screenshot of Andrew and made it his zoom background. As TA block was nearing its end, we all agreed to change our background to Andrew’s frozen zoom background and change our zoom names to Andrew G. Then, we invited TA Rachel into the breakout room, where she seemed exceptionally amused. To see her reaction, press this link.
To end off the day, Charis and I redeemed our ticket to a show performed by Alex’s talented and adorable dog, Felix. The show comprised of Felix showing off many tricks, such as high-fiving Alex, speaking, and running around Alex’s legs. Although the show ended quickly, both Charis and I enjoyed watching Alex baby his dog.
Throughout this eventful day, I have taken away two pieces of information. The first thing to remember is that any day at SSP is a fun day, regardless of how challenging the material is. The second thing that I will take into the rest of the program is #cancelsai.
