Some Pawful News
Over 2 weeks ago, my social media got a rather surprising update from me. I was leaving Juniata College at the end of the month to join the workforce in Pittsburgh as an Animal Control Officer. I had gotten numerous positive and cheerful comments praising me on the next chapter of my life, some people were sad and upset that I was leaving, others were confused and attempted to get my reasoning and change my mind. However, they all had something in common: they all believed it. I was surprised that most people believed that I was going to leave my college when I was more than halfway done my years here at Juniata.
The hardest part of this process was figuring out what my fake news was going to be. I thought for days about what I should do. I had a feeling people were going to say they were leaving campus. I felt that doing that would have been redundant if other people were already doing it. I first thought about saying that I was straight, but that would have been too obvious. I thought of saying that I was bi. However, I didn’t believe that would have been good enough. After my roommate, Tony posted his, I figured I too would have to “leave campus”. Now, I had to find what caused my sudden withdrawal from campus. After a few hours of research, I had found the perfect idea: an Animal Control Officer Position in Pittsburgh
For those who don’t know, I was very involved with animals, especially dogs. Throughout my middle and high school career, I was an avid volunteer with the Animal Control Officer. I helped handle dogs during their adoption days and even started helping out at the shelter itself working with other community members. I had some experience in the field, and now being on campus I try to volunteer as much as I could. This led me to PAWS and being one of the officers for it. After seeing that job listing (yes the Animal Control Officer position in Pittsburgh is an actively seeking position on Indeed), I knew it would be the basis of my fake news.
As I said, most of the comments were positive and cheerful. I had a lot of people congratulating me. Some people said that they were going to miss me. I even had a friend from high school tell me that if I needed anything that I should contact them, which I appreciated. On the other hand, one person was testing me as to why I was leaving. They kept on asking me questions about why I was leaving so soon and if I could continue my semester even though I would be leaving. I decided to play along, try to answer the questions as best as I can to see if I can continue to have her believe I was leaving. Once she had finished her questions, I told her how it wasn’t true and how I am staying on campus. Another person was relieved when I told him I was staying on campus because he thought my leaving was a terrible idea.
I would say that I felt bad lying, which is somewhat true. I did feel bad until I told people that it was false. There was a feeling of relief and enjoyment (mostly because this was happening throughout the talks of campus shutting down because of COVID-19) so telling people that I am not leaving was a source of fun while I was on campus. Once I posted that I was staying on campus 4 days later, I got a lot of responses about how people were relieved and how I had people’s support no matter what I chose which really warmed my heart.
