Sherman Ave’s 14-Step Guide to Green Cup

Growing your own weed is a great way to reduce greenhouse emissions from its transportation!

The Green Cup has begun. Yet another year’s Battle of Champions has kicked off. Who will make SEED the proudest? Who will prove themselves true warriors of conservation? Who is willing to go the longest without flushing their toilet?

Here are Sherman Ave’s 14 tips to show off your raw, feral dominance over all the others on campus.

1. Don’t use lights when you don’t have to. By now you should know your way around your dorm rooms, so only use the lights when you really need to find stuff. Otherwise just feel around. It will really make a difference for the Cup.

2. Turn your laptop brightness as low as it goes. This will work well, especially because all our lights will be off so glare won’t be a problem.

3. Shower less often. If you are a daily showerer, try to cut it down to every other day. We can stand each other being a bit smelly, right guys? And its actually way better for your hair.

4. Find non-electronic ways for entertainment. Try playing the piano or going for a walk or reading instead of sitting on your computer watching Breaking Bad all day.

5. Try doing your essays and whatnot on real paper instead of on your computer. This will keep you from having to charge your laptops so much!

6. Unplug everything. Just stop using the wall outlets for a few days. You can get by with a battery clock, and in general you will find that most things you leave plugged in all day you don’t actually use.

7. Start using generators. Get a generator to sit outside by the entrance to your dorm/house that you can use when you really need electricity. So if your phone is about to die, just crank it up and plug it in. This won’t count against you in the competition! Just be sure everyone brings by a bit of gasoline to keep it running.

8. Stop using the bathrooms. It is like 5 gallons a flush for the toilets! And you can’t just not flush cause of the autoflush mechanisms. Start using bathrooms in other dorms or like over at Tech or Burger King. Or just go outside. You can’t keep wasting all this water on flushes!!

9. Whenever you are with a friend who doesn’t live in your dorm/house, try to sabotage them as much as possible. Insist on using the extra lights, take an extra flush or two when you are using their bathroom, “accidentally” turn on all of their faucets and showers, etc. This will really turn the tides towards you!

10. Stop using the Key Fobs to get in. Just knock til someone opens them. It takes a bit more power for the key fob systems to work than it does for someone to just open the door, and every bit counts!

11. Unplug the fire alarm systems. They use a ton of electricity to keep monitoring everything, and honestly there’s not gonna be any fires happening with everything unplugged. If you very carefully pull the alarms out of the wall (without tripping them), and cut the green wire, then the blue wire, they will successfully be detached from the electricity.

12. Find clever ways to stop the cleaning service. They show up at regularly scheduled times to come into each building, and waste tons of water. Learn their schedules, and wait by the entrances to hold the doors shut from them, or find a way to tie off the door. If you leave someone at the door 24/7, they can let people in without the Fobs and keep cleaning services away.

13. For the most extreme of us, try shutting off power or water from your building. Getting into the steam tunnels is pretty easy, and finding your utilities shut-offs can be too if you follow these easy tips – go directly under your building, then move down the tunnel in the direction of Facilities Management for a distance of half the longest side of your building. Then turn to your left (or right for buildings east of Sheridan) and see the seven knobs next to the breaker. Unscrew the fifth, then second knobs, but leave the first and third. After a couple of minutes, tighten all the knobs except the first and sixth, which should be completely removed. Ta da! No more water! For the power, just flip off all the breakers. Be sure to get out quickly, as the seventh knob will soon burst, flooding the steam tunnels (don’t worry, it hasn’t gotten to your building’s meter yet). Easy as pie.

And most importantly:

14. Abuse your friends who don’t follow all of these tips! If you go into your friend’s room and she has her lights on, don’t just turn them off, actually hit her to teach her a lesson for leaving the lights on. Lock her doors so she can’t get in there to turn on any lights. I will be patrolling the halls whenever I have free time to make sure everyone is following all the guidelines and turning off lights whenever I can. I will search any unlocked rooms for discrepancies.

If you do all this, you can win the Green Cup and show everyone how much better you are than them. It will prove once and for all your obvious superiority over every other Northwestern student, alumus, and faculty member.

Make waste a smudge on your big-ass boot of progress.