If you’re a student at UMass Boston who’s lived on campus, you know that the elevators are always reliable, safe and never have any issues. Now, if you’re actually a student at UMass Boston who’s lived on campus, you’ll know that everything I just said is an absolute lie. I don’t believe that all three elevators in Motley East Hall have worked at the same time since the first day of school. I have a hunch that, oh, I don’t know, USING THEM, is the real issue here.
After doing some digging, I uncovered a mole in the system. They wanted to remain anonymous, but I don’t care about that. Vinny Capiche was his name, and the guy worked in the office of Residential Housing and Life a few years ago. He was in charge of handling the elevators and making sure that everything ran smoothly. The problem was that he hired an installation company that was affiliated with the mafia.
In fact, Vinny himself was an undercover, self-proclaimed “mob dude” and a real “middle-of-the-pack” kind of guy. He was no Joe Pesci, but that was always the goal. The company charged an obscene amount of money for the elevators because they’re the mafia and that’s sort of their whole shtick. When Vinny couldn’t keep up with the payments, the mafia would shut the elevators down. He’s still paying off the damn things to this day, which is why the residents have to deal with these issues.
One factor of him not climbing the “corporate” ladder was his lack of ability to negotiate. In order to keep his side of the street clean, he had made up the lie that it was the students breaking and not the elevators. We have been told that it is our fault for overcrowding and going wild in them. We don’t create footprints on the walls and break the bars for no reason, we just need to let out some aggression! Ever heard of blowing off a little steam? Besides, if the elevators actually worked, and Vinny got his finances together, we wouldn’t have these issues to begin with.
Fortunately for Vinny, the mafia likes to make things interesting. They told him that if he used these opportunities to mess with the kids along with already wasting their time, they would cut Vinny some slack on the payments. Vinny took advantage of these opportunities and conducted numerous experiments on us. At first, he wanted to see how far we were willing to go to avoid taking the stairs, as it turned out, the answer was seemingly eternity. Even the people who lived on the second floor were willing to stand and wait forever. They were that damn lazy! This was never really for scientific purposes, but more so for entertainment. Oh, how he and his buddies would sit down in front of the surveillance camera live feed, cigar in one hand, glass of Scotch in the other, and laugh the night away.
Other experiments that he had conducted throughout the years consisted of controlling the elevator speeds. Sometimes he would speed them up like a TikTok audio, and other times he would create a slowed, reverbed version of them. Other times, in the middle of the night, he put up signs that all three were temporarily out of commission, and kids would still wait for the blue arrow to illuminate. To date, Vinny’s favorite prank on the students was the time he pulled the fire alarm, where everyone evacuated, and he hosted a poker and cocktail hour with the boys while all the students and staff were out in the Boston cold for over an hour.
Sadly, the experiments eventually got pretty stale, and the situation Vinny had going on wasn’t cutting it anymore. The Joe Pesci’s of his crew were getting bored of the sophomoric goofs and were growing tired of Vinny’s antics, beginning to find him annoying. They called the deal off, and Vinny was given until the end of the month to repay his debt… or else. Knowing for a fact he couldn’t make that happen, Vinny decided to flee the New England area, disappearing off the edge of the map, and by failing to pay, condemning the resident hall elevators to be forever busted.
Vinny Capiche was a scummy, no-good, rotten nobody that got enjoyment out of making trouble for everyone around him. He was also an idiot. How he managed to pull off his vile scheme for so long, I’ll never know, but what I do know is that after foolishly providing me with this story, his “Boss” discovered Vinny’s whereabouts and “cleaned up the mess” immediately afterward. All in all, taking the stairs ain’t so bad, especially because you never know what kind of criminal underworld you’ll get sucked down into taking one of those stinkin’ elevators.