I run into Stephen A. Turban ’17, one half of a former UC presidential ticket, in the dark recesses of the Square. He's looking dapper in a crisp bow tie and a bright red-pink shirt. Before Ava Nasrollahzadeh ’16 and Dhruv P. Goyal ’16 have won the UC presidency, Turban and his running mate, Luke R. Heine ’17 allow me to crash their bro time in the UC office and wait for the results of the UC presidential election to come in. If the two are nervous, they aren’t showing it.
The subject of conversation quickly turns to their relatively extreme campaign spending, and the fines they incurred along the way. “If we were going to break rules we wanted to be excessively creative,” Turban muses. “You've got to break rules in style.” Heine agrees.
Turban even admits to a little bending of the truth in his campaign slogans. “I promised that I have a large endowment. Not true. Relatively small.” We imagine the headlines. “Loses election! Penis below average size.”
The cap on campaign spending limited some of the pair's more extravagant plans. They ordered custom toilet paper, bearing their faces and the slogan “Cleaning Up the UC.” Due to the apparently incredibly high cost of custom toilet paper, however, they were unable to deploy it. “I think if we lose, this would have won us the election, and I want that on record. This would have changed the UC,” Turban says.
How much exactly did they spend on toilet paper? “We are never revealing that,” Heine says, unsmiling, looking like a man who’s been to toilet paper hell and back.
Turban nods, seriously. “I'll take that to my grave. I'll be buried with it.” A pause. “Actually, I’ll take it to my bathroom.”
With the election results looming, the duo turns to the next most important step in their campaign process: preparing post-result memes. Heine has recently been robbed of his bike (“Can you put out a wanted ad for my bike? It's blue. It's a mountain bike.”), and thus settled on “Loses election, loses bike.” Turban chooses the more cheerful “Loses election, wins best friend.”
These skills, unsurprisingly, are integral to the UC process. “You get really good at making GIFs and making memes,” Turban quips.
The pair has a campaign meeting every morning, but sometimes UC work wasn't the first item on the agenda. “Some of them would be just: Dude, we gotta finish Math 21a. No campaigning today, I guess.”
Pretty soon, we’ll know the results of all that campaigning, as the clock ticks ever closer to the big reveal. Will results be posted at 10 p.m.? Or at 10:07, in line with Harvard tradition? How will we be getting the results? Turban shrugs. “We'll probably just look on Facebook.”
Speaking of Facebook, Turban gets real for a moment. “The problem with Luke and I [sic] is that we’re both Facebook sluts.”
Heine fervently disagrees. “That's not true! I post links! People think they're interesting! I'm educating the Facebook community.” Hard hitting investigation reveals that Heine often shares links from Wikipedia Cool Freaks, a group that finds nifty pages on Wikipedia to share with the world. But he has a dark secret. “Sometimes I copy-paste the links, and say that I found them.”
And then in a single text, we receive the results. Verdict: a Nasrollahzadeh-Goyal victory. Heine and Turban release a simultaneous sigh. “Bum,” declares Turban.
Heine shrugs, “Loses election, loses bike. It's on,” and posts the meme. The pair may have lost the race, but we quickly note that they at least won fourth place votes.
Despite the disappointing news, the two are in high spirits. They stare off into the metaphorical distance and wax nostalgic. “Amazing. Amazing. We had some really good stunts. Put some really good times up,” Turban says of the campaign.
“Unbelievable. Except for losing my bike,” Heine chimes in. After I learn that they biked together to the IOP, I am now convinced that the bike theft was a ploy from an opposing campaign.
All in all, it seems like much fun was had, many pranks were pulled, toilet paper was bought, and friends were brought closer together. Heine gives an ambiguously serious smile and laughs, “I'd do it again. And at least we still have the UC private jet.”
