I Bet This Never Happens to Dartmouth Grads

I graduated from a little college in the middle of nowhere. I went there for good reasons, or so I thought at the time; the price was right (Mom worked there for a couple of years, which gave me a huge tuition break), there were a few programs that were pretty good, and it was probably the path of least resistance for a kid that really didn't do the grade chase in high school.

That being said, the place is kinda obscure. And the eighties were not kind to the school, which in the year after I graduated came within a day of having to lock its doors and send the kids home. It's bounced back nicely since then, nearly doubling its enrollment - but the mid-eighties were a rough time at my college. The stress of the time - shady administrators, some dubious faculty, and the sense that we could all be locked out of our dorms at any time - made for a less-than-optimal college experience.

The stress probably cut down on some of the traditional college activities, like "making friends you'll keep for the rest of your life", which is a big part of the reason for going to a bigger, more prominent, more expensive school; friends when you're 21 become contacts when you're 40. Let's just say I've got great contacts if I want to move back to small-town North Dakota. Which, God bless the place, I do not.

Upshot being that while I stay in contact with a lot of my high school classmates (Jamestown High School 1981 was a pretty close-knit bunch, as high school classes go, and I genuinely look forward to reunions), my college classmates are pretty much an afterthought (although more on this in a later post).

Actually, it's worse than that. In most cases, hearing from them is something I dread.

No, it's nothing personal. It's just business, as Don Corleone would say.

The business, as it happens, is always multi-level marketing.

I got another one the other day - a call from a long-lost classmate (we hadn't spoken since Ronald Reagan's second term) with whom I'd not been particularly close at the time, and who just wanted to reconnect...

...and, by the way, discuss a great new business opportunity.

Cue primal scream of frustration.

I'm at the point where it's principals be damned; I'm going to tell the kids "do whatever you have to to get into a Northwestern or a Michigan or an Ivy League place, just so you never have to go through the hassle of trying to disengage from a deep, meaningful conversation about Herbalife or Amway or whatever Amway's online division was, or NuSkin or TruSkin or Liquid Void or Mary Kay" or whatever the hell they're pushing these days.

Open letter to all classmates; I am not interested in being a regional distributor for anything, ever. No, ever. Thank you.

That is all.