If you happened to dine in Carmichael recently you might already know me. My Tufts ID Card was hanging there all weekend, taped to the desk by the lunch ladies for all of the world - or at least the Tufts community - to see. Friday morning when I tabled at Carmichael to raise money for the American Heart Association, the workers informed me that I would need to leave my card with them if I wanted to continue sitting there.
They never asked me what charity I was raising money for or if I had gotten approval. They just wanted the card. And I guess all you really need to fundraise around campus is a piece of plastic with your name and picture on the front. After an hour of hearing why students just weren't up for fighting heart disease that day, I left the dining hall quickly, completely forgetting to grab my ID.
It wasn't until Saturday morning that I realized how much inadvertent publicity I must have been getting. Throughout the day about eight people approached me to tell me that they had seen my ID in the dining hall and that I should probably go get it.
It's kind of embarrassing to leave it there. On several occasions I had asked friends why they didn't try to grab my ID for me when they saw it hanging there, implicating me for the irresponsible keeper of cards I am. (I've lost four credit cards in three years.)
A few had actually tried to take my ID, but were reprimanded by the employees who said that they could not give it to anyone other than me. I even got on the phone with one of them, begging, pleading with her to please pass the card off to my girlfriend who lives uphill and goes to Carmichael more frequently than me, but to no avail. I even assured them that I had no Points on the card to be stolen and that they would not be held responsible for any type of meal fraud.
Still nothing. "Couldn't you at least keep it behind the desk?" I asked. "No." I started to feel as if they wanted to keep my card out there, to give me the most exposure possible - hundreds of students in and out of the dining hall staring at me. I thought they wanted me to become the face of Tufts Dining, for me to become a recognizable face on campus.
I'm no Ron Burgundy, in that I don't consider myself "kind of a big deal." If anything, I'm more kind of a medium deal - like Domino's 5-5-5 deal. Sure, it may seem like a great idea late at night after a party, but it is definitely something you could regret the next day. To give full disclosure though, just because I wouldn't say "people know me" doesn't mean they haven't heard of me. I learned this at my Senior Dinner last Monday when President Bacow greeted me at the door. When he said, "Welcome Neil," I assumed he was simply staring at my nametag but then he mentioned that he's actually read my column. Not gonna lie - I cringed a little bit.
Yet given all of my exposure around campus for the past four years - playing at Brown and Brew, appearing on TUTV, writing for the Daily, believe it or not, I'm still able to walk around campus fairly anonymously.
I have known people who would get recognized everywhere. My friend Eni, for instance, couldn't go anywhere our sophomore year without people telling him they loved his show on TUTV. He was the star of his very own self-titled sitcom, "Anything Eni." It was so wildly successful that it ran for two episodes. My guess is that most people caught it at 3 a.m. in a drunken state while they shoveled down some Domino's.
Eni became so well known, in fact, that it started to go to his head a little bit - so much so, that for his 20th birthday we bought him a shirt from Urban Outfitters that said, "Local Celebrity" on the front.
Of course, he still gets recognized sometimes but most of the Eni hysteria has died down by now. Last night though, at a bar, I remembered that Eni has achieved a level of superstardom at Tufts that I will never know. A girl happened to come over and start flirting with him, telling him that she thought he was "so cute" on "Anything Eni," and that he is "so tall in person."
Eni tried to get me involved in the conversation and said, "You know, Neil was the producer." At which point the girl stopped, stared at me, and asked, "Didn't I see your Tufts ID hanging in Carmichael?"
Neil Padover is a senior majoring in English. He can be reached at neil.padover@tufts.edu.
