Imagine you walk into your room, and atop your bed, chunks of dirty rubber swarm the sheets, beset the blankets and pervade the pillows. You have two choices: attempt to take on the impenetrable pile, or give in, accepting your miserable fate. This is the daily struggle students fight and contribute to at school when facing left-behind eraser shavings.
Perhaps this is a trivial situation to many, but to me, it is selfish and cruel. Somehow, every desk I encounter looks as though a 72-pound wheel of gray parmesan cheese was grated over the entire surface. Though I fully support erasing, I find disregarded piles of shavings left for someone else to clean ignorant and disturbing. This is like dumping garbage in the street and expecting someone to clean it up. It is wrong, and it is gross.
With the exception of one group, all are to blame for this dastardly deed. Those who notice a culmination of sediment either sweep it off the desk, which is the correct action, or they choose to ignore it, smushing the gray nubs into the surface. This is terrible and makes for a distracting work environment.
If this habit continues, I imagine this will mirror the Bartonian age of the Eocene epoch when the first sedimentary rocks formed. If ignored, these shavings will be crushed into desks by the books of negligent perpetrators. Over time, they will condense, and as more fragments are produced, the girth of the buildup will expand abundantly. Before we know it, students will have to stand on chairs to reach the new surface, zombies to the normalized mutation of pollution.
Must we keep condemning each other to these filthy conditions? I think not. Sweeping excess eraser bits off of the desk, into your hand or into the trash takes practically no effort. This is my plea to all: please tend to your eraser shavings.
