UBC Buildering Contest 4

ardarvin — Sat, 04/08/2006 - 23:41

(p) Oker.

I originally advertised this event as the "3rd Annual Buildering Contest", but after some deep moments of recollection, I realized that there was already a 3rd annual contest, it just wasn't very well attended, and apparently nobody took any photos to document the event. How quickly my memory fails me.

So here's a brief written history of the UBC Buildering Contests, documented for generations to come.

The first buildering contest to ever take place in the history of mankind, EVER, took place at UBC on April 7th, 2004. OK, I highly doubt it was the first buildering contest ever, but since the Euros are in to their overly exaggerated claims (i.e. a “buildering world championship” with only local participants), I figure I’d lay claim to it.

The first contest was a large success. Lots of eager faces, excited to try out something new. I figure we had around 25 participants before we got shut down by campus security.

The second contest took place in the fall of 2004, with slightly fewer climbers. We switched the format to breaking into two smaller groups, which worked great for not attracting attention to ourselves, but lacked a bit of the excitement from having one large chaotic group.

Then someone from the UBC legal department found out we were organizing the contests on campus, and authorities became very interested in dishing out some student discipline. Myself, having already graduated from UBC, could care less about their threats of expulsion. However the same could not be said for most of the other participants.

The executives of the AMS Clubs office received some misinformation on the existence of an official UBC Buildering Club, and were interested in meeting with its members -- to shoot the shit and ask for autographs I’m sure. So I canceled any further UBC buildering competitions.

Kenny Frazz is too strong. Admin Dyno. (p) Oker.

(p) Oker.

But given people's insatiable desire to pull on concrete, we had a very informal contest six months later in the spring of 2005. I can't remember much about it, nor can I find any pictures of it, but I do know SteveZ won.

So, that brings us up to the present. Being somewhat paranoid, I didn’t think I'd be able to advertise this year's event without being shut down by campus authorities. Yes, cops and lawyers do occasionally frequent buildering.net – a fact brought to my attention recently by a WestEnder reporter. The reporter asked a UBC Student Counsel lawyer for his opinion on buildering, "Well I don't have a problem with the website, since it's all photoshopped." Phew, good thing I've got that disclaimer up, I wouldn't want lawyers getting the wrong idea.

(p) Oker.

Ultimately I credit Alain Robert for snapping me out of my ever increasing paranoia. Alain has been arrested over 100 times, and he’s still climbing as hard as ever, traveling the world, and making a killing from it. Apparently my fears of being restricted access to other countries, such as the USA, are unfounded. As the man said himself, “it’s just a misdemeanor, no big deal”.

Having a clean criminal record makes getting that first offense a hard pill to swallow, but I'm hoping that it'll be similar to how I felt after my first drink of alcohol: I'll look back and wonder what the big deal was.

So anyway, onto this year’s contest. This, the 4th UBC Buildering Contest, was a huge, smashing, euro-blowout of an event. As I waited in the Student Union Building for people to arrive, person after person sauntered over (builderers saunter, they don’t walk), eager to climb some buildings.

There was a total of 30-35 people. Of course having such a large group of men, women, and children (we had a 4 year old contestant this year) climbing buildings meant a high risk of being noticed and reported to the police. And that’s exactly what happened. By the time security finally did catch up with us, they had already received three separate calls.

I was hoping that having a large group would work to our advantage, since 30 people climbing on something seems a lot less suspicious than two or three people doing the same. You’d hope that people would assume this is an official club, organization, or at the very least something harmless – look at the CHILD for god’s sake! But no, people are dumb. Very, VERY dumb. Read on.

SteveZ sends with his eyes closed.(p) Oker.

Katy, Admin Dyno(p) Oker.

Karl, Dentistry (p) Michael.

At this point, it's worth noting that a few of us brought crash pads for safety. Well I guess some of the aforementioned cop calling rocket scientists thought that we were breaking into buildings and stealing CHESTERFIELDS! “Well I can’t really tell officer, but it looks like they are climbing into buildings…oh wait they're leaving with some large cushions on their backs….I think they are stealing chesterfields!”

I used to get mad at the people who call the cops on us (rats, snitches, why don't you grow a pair?), but now I feel more sorry for them than anything else. It's a sad, frightened existence people must be living in order to call the cops on a bunch of kids out having good, clean fun.

These are the elementary school tattle-tales that ratted out Derek for throwing a spool of thread at the back of the teacher’s head. That's right Heather, way to break an hour and a half of classmate solidarity in detention. That hour and a half was my greatest moment of hope and pride for the human race, and you single-handedly destroyed that moment.

Katy make quick work of the most difficult problem. IRC (p) Michael.

Stewart enjoying a nice finger crack. Life Sciences. (p) Oker.

There she is...the rat in the window. (p) Oker.

Yeah, so we got shutdown by some loser of a tattle-tale with no friends. You can see her in the background of one of the photos, she's pounding on a window trying to get our attention.

Luckily, when on UBC campus, 911 calls of this nature are dispatched to campus security before the police. This extra “true authority buffer” usually means I’ll be flipping the bird and running away long before the guys with the red and blue lights on their cars show up.

However this time campus security arrived in full force. No less than three cars and one police dog screeched to a halt as we sauntered away from our last climb. Again, normally I would’ve politely bade my adieu and ran, but I have an innate fear of mean looking dogs sinking their teeth into my toned calf muscles. Also, being a rather large group of crash pad toters hindered our mobility somewhat. I’d hate to be the lone runner and spoil everything for the rest who stayed behind to face the music. "Why did he run? Do you know him? Either you tell us who he is or you are all going down to the station."

Given that we were dealing with Campus Cowboys (everyone's pet name for Campus Security) and not the police, we pretty much refused to talk, give ID, or even acknowledge the existence of these wanna-be's. This especially holds true when they are completely unprofessional, power-trip on you, threaten you with vandalism charges, student discipline, and tell you to erase your digital camera. Extra points to Oker for sneakily ejecting his memory card onto the ground, and going through the motions of formatting his camera to the satisfaction of the said cowboys. Without that clever move, we wouldn’t have these beautiful pictures to accompany this article.

Because we refused to cooperate, but were too afraid of the dog to run, we were in a sort of stalemated position. The cowboys had no choice but to call the cops. When the boys in blue did arrive, we were nothing short of saints. We explained how we were just working out, training for rock-climbing, being very safe (look at the chesterfields!), and not harming anything. The police, being very professional and understanding, checked our names to “see if any of you are axe-murderers”, gave us a brief lecture on how the Cowboys were the real authority figures since it was their private property (my B.S. detector was going off, but I wisely kept this to myself), and let us go. Cowboys, if you are reading this, there is a lesson to be learnt here: be friendly, don’t power trip, and you’ll get much better results.

Contest Results:

1st place: Kenny Frazz
2nd place: ?
3rd place: ? (we were too distracted by lesbian night at the bar to add up scores)

PS: This was a photoshopping contest. Nobody actually climbed anything.