This seemingly benign dessert option has… sinister implications.

Ah, the John Jay dessert table. Truly, one of the great things about our sainted Columbia University in the City of New York: the buttery sugar cookies, the generous crumb topping of the coffee cake, the cloyingly sweet chemical taste of that Oreo cheesecake stuff.

And yet… an illness has infected the John Jay desert table, and its name is “self-service pie.”

Yes: for those of you who pay no attention to what goes on in John Jay Dining Hall (and we should all be so lucky), it often happens that, instead of a scrumptious tray of pudding cups or scones, the dessert table will instead be graced by the presence of multiple, entirely uncut, pies. Usually it’s an apple pie, but I seem to recall a peach pie once, and on occasion one might find—oh, horror, I cannot begin to speak it—banana cream. 

Imagine, if you will, a swarm of ravenous undergraduates. After they have dispensed with their salads, their various bean dishes, and their pasta coated in flavored oil, they might desire a little sweet treat. As a reward. On a normal John Jay evening, the kind that God intended when he founded Columbia University in 1492, our pack of electrical engineering majors and squash players would, quite simply, pick up their danish or cookie with the provided pair of tongs and return to their seat.

But no. Not on pie nights.

Instead, what happens is that a sort of amorphous blob develops around the site of the pies, holding up traffic between the “King’s Table” and the fusion station—which itself develops a line—and the rest of John Jay. If you’ve waited long enough, or fought your way with shoulders and elbows to the front of the line, congratulations! You get to serve yourself a piece of pie, a sport that will be spectated and commented on by fifty of your closest friends. 

As you approach the pie, you might find it blessedly intact. Lovely, you think—until you realize it falls on you to not fuck this up. And John Jay provides no cutting utensils, so you’re forced to attempt to make a clean breast of your slice of pie with only the blunt edge of the spatula. Of course, you can’t do this given how dry the crust is, so you end up with one mangled mound of sweet apple filling and crust dust on your plate, and you’ve made another 5th grade geology project in the piepan. Oh, look! There’s your teacher in the crowd! You failed the project. You don’t understand the difference between weathering and erosion. She confiscates your pie.

Or you could get to the pie after a number of people have already taken their share of the riches. At this point, the pies look more like anatomical diagrams prepared for Civil War field nurses than baked goods—doubly so if the pie in question happens to be cream-based, in which case a thin film of congealed pudding with fallen hair and dandruff develops in the bottom of the pan. A number of people have hacked their piece off so as to avoid a dark region of the pie’s surface (possible biohazard?). Your remaining options are:

1. The Big Piece. If you take the Big Piece, everyone around you will crush you until the carbon in your body has solidified into diamond.

1a. Cut the Big Piece. In attempting to cut the Big Piece, you will undoubtedly slip when manuvering the spatula and end up destroying it, just like you destroy everything else in your life.

2. The Little Piece—a substantial portion for a Borrower or a guinea pig, but not for a human adult.

3. The Strange Piece. All crust. Suitable for perverts.

There is a final possibility: you may be given the duty and the honor of taking the last piece of pie. When this happens, one of the workers rings a little gong, and then everyone has to clap for you. After you take your spoils, you are faced with the responsibility of the  empty piepan, a void. Am I supposed to wear this as a hat? you think. Yes. Wear it as a hat. Coat your hair in sticky sugar. Attract birds to your film seminar. You’ve earned it. 

…I need to go lie down.

Intact pie via Bwarchives