Beware of Murphy Hall! The horror, the horror!

  Doug Lief Lief is a fourth-year English
student who knows too much and makes up the rest. Furtively contact
him at [email protected]. Click
Here for more articles by Doug Lief

Buildings: they strike terror into the hearts of every man,
woman and man-child, but why? They are places of stone and steel,
of tile and velvet rope, where lines are long and souls are
silenced. In Murphy Hall, no one gives a crap if you scream.

Named for Murphy’s Law, the building so innocently lurking
near Schoenberg Hall is a labyrinth of red tape and hunan
suffering. I realize I just spelled “human” like spicy
hunan style shrimp, but in the depths of Murphy Hall, one must
press on. This is the place where the bureaucracy that makes campus
life possible metastasizes.

Perhaps a brief history of Murphy Hall is in order for those of
you who do not believe that such horrors can exist on our idyllic
campus (barring the Aryan-Cyborg project beneath the Medical
Center).

If you have ever been inside, you know that Murphy Hall is the
only architectural Mobius strip in existence. No matter where you
are in the building, you will find yourself two floors away from
where you want to go.

There are floors within floors, elevators to floor B, which is
the same as A in a completely different elevator. It was designed
this way by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright during his lesser
known “Screw you, buddy” period near the end of his
life when he was having various dilemmas with opium and the
IRS.

In the early days of the campus, Murphy Hall became a
speak-easy, as it was damn near impossible for Johnny Law to
navigate its corridors to find the bathtub hooch.

Unfortunately this scheme also made it very difficult for
inebriates to find their way out of the building, and subsequently
the basements are filled with the skeletons of Prohibition Era
dandies and flappers.

  Illustration by RODERICK ROXAS/Daily Bruin Soon after it
was turned into an insane asylum for engineering majors, until the
inmates were all poisoned, burned alive, poisoned again, buried
upside down, cursed and laughed at by children.

During the war the building became an animation studio for
propaganda cartoons, until those animators were also poisoned,
stabbed, decapitated, poisoned again, buried with pentagrams and
laughed at by children.

This pattern repeated itself as Murphy Hall was re-used as a
battered women’s shelter, museum of the occult, day care
center, Manson Family member deprogramming hostel, YMCA, abandoned
amusement park and finally, a ’50s diner. Needless to say,
don’t hang around the place at midnight.

Today, Murphy Hall houses the famed UCLA Ministry of Truth. Like
George Orwell’s vision in “1984,” our own UCLA
Ministry of Truth is where your permanent records are kept.

They know you got your name on the board with a check next to it
in third grade for throwing erasers at Geeky McNerdypuss. They have
wiretaps of junior high school when you asked your friend to ask
out that hot girl for you. They have wiretaps of high school when
you asked your friend to ask out that hot junior high school girl
for you. If you want copies, you just have to fill out the right
form.

For instance, suppose you want to have a transcript sent to your
car insurance company for a good-student discount. You could go to
the Student Office of Affairs, or the Office of Affairs of
Students, or the Bureau of the Office of Student Affairs, or the
Office of Bureau Affairs. Each will instruct you to wait in line at
the other.

Eventually you will find yourself in room 101 (probably
somewhere on the third floor, but then, they’re all the same
floor, aren’t they?). It is a horrendous place where pens are
kept on chains and the puppet master pulls the strings.

As you go down your inquisitionnaire form, you will find there
are pieces of information that you will need to put down, even
though the Murphites already know it themselves.

They will ask you for, say, your driver’s license number.
Of course, they could have found it all out from looking your name
up in the computer where all this information resides already, but
they would prefer that you dance their infernal tarantella of
documentation. But the most terrifying part of all is yet to come:
the carbon copy forms in triplicate!

Did you ever know a student who you just sort of lost touch with
and you never see them around campus, but you’re pretty sure
they didn’t drop out? Well, it is time you knew what I know.
They were spirited away in one of those campus vans never to be
seen again.

Where do you think all that carbon for the carbon copies comes
from, my non-silicon based reader? Did you think they just ground
up diamonds? Well, I guffaw at your blissful ignorance! Guffaw!
Guffaw and so-forth! Harumph, too.

Just think, after you leave the depths of Murphy Hall, you now
have a little yellow piece of paper as a record of your time in the
labyrinth; a little yellow piece of paper covered in Bruin.

And don’t even get me started on Kerckhoff. Oy!