Staff Troublemaker

Dave's articles published in The Voice

1986 to 1988

For reasons now lost in the mists of time, I wrote a series of articles for The Voice, Bloomsburg University's student-run newspaper. Most of these articles were humourous (or at least attempted to be) and most of them ran in the Op-Ed section on page 2 of the newspaper. My by-line for most of the run was "Staff Troublemaker".

At first I submitted the articles almost anonymously. I signed the articles with my real name but slipped them under the editor's door when no one was looking. After about a year of this the editor caught me submitting a piece. At that point I was drafted into the paper's official staff and did copy editing as well as layout work.

I only have the printed issues from 1987 and 1988 in my archives. I found many of my earlier articles in my collection of old floppy diskettes, but most of them are not dated, so I don't really know how many articles I wrote for The Voice or exactly when I started writing them.

I still have, in one form or another, over 30 of these articles. I'll be posting the ones I think are still worth sharing here a few at a time as I get them formatted for web viewing.

• 9/10/1987: Word Processing Mojo: A writer's thoughts on word processors. "Open the disk drive door, Hal..."
• 9/28/1987: Computer Science 101: An introduction to using a computer, 1987 style.
• 10/12/1987: Garage Band Press Release: The infamous Khukri press release. A few friends and I actually did have a garage band at the time, although any resemblance between our band and the group described in this article is pure coincidence. (koff koff koff!)
• 10/15/1987: Grannies Going Forty: I worked my way through my first three years of college as a medical courier, driving a 140-mile route every day. This article was my tirade against being stuck behind someone driving too slowly, something that was on my mind a lot in those days.
• 5/3/1988: The Non-Frat is Where It's At: The Beta^5 Non-Fraternity article. Much to my surprise, I never got a response to this article from the fraternities and sororities on campus, although they did respond to some of my other pieces.
• 5/11/1988: A Fistful of Invoices: A typical day at work for me. Well, actually, most days I didn't have ninjas and National Guard tanks to deal with.
• 5/11/1988: Confessions of a Presidential Hopeful: "It is with great regret that I must announce that I am withdrawing from the presidential race..."
• 9/8/1988: Coming to a Theater Near You: My spec script for my hit movie, "The Data Processing Kid".