By Angelica Beneke
Staff Writer

This meme is brought to you by your campus Starbucks.

The Meme of the Week is one of those photo edit memes. A photo edit meme is where someone takes a screen shot of a TV show – usually with subtitles – and edits it to reflect a personal life experience that’s meme worthy. It’s also a time-sensitive meme, a meme that references a certain point in time and you have to be experiencing that point to fully appreciate the meme.

This particular photo edit/time-sensitive meme has a screen cap from “The Office.” The subtitles have been modified to say, “and I feel eduroam in this Starbucks tonight,” and it’s a picture of Pam singing with a very blurred Dwight and random guy in the background.

The OP’s caption is, “When you’re home for Fall Break and your computer connects to eduroam in a Starbucks.”

Time to analyze this masterpiece of a meme because I think this meme, although I do have some questions, is well-crafted.

First, I find it interesting that the OP doesn’t mention whether or not the Starbucks was part of a college campus. I remember when eduroam was first announced at Hofstra, it was pushed as, “you could go to other universities and still be able to connect to the Wi-Fi via eduroam.”

But the OP mentions that they could connect at a Starbucks. So, this means one of the two things. Either OP is at a Starbucks located on a university campus or the Starbucks the OP was at is its own university. Or, at least, it’s probably a school within the university (like Herbert School of Communication is a school in Hofstra).

Maybe she was at the Starbucks School for the Highly Caffeinated.

To be quite honest, with the number of students who are so dependent on the beverage, I’m honestly shocked there aren’t entire schools in most universities across the country solely dedicated to caffeinated beverage theory.

One might argue that’s what the science department is for. Well, the science department needs to get more specific. Just throwing beverage theory with chemistry or whatever and calling it a day is not going to work.

Moving along.

The choice to use a screenshot from “The Office” works very well in this context. I have yet to run into a college student who doesn’t know what that show is. That universality and the fact that eduroam is supposed to be in many, many college campuses blend very well together.

I’m very curious about the use of home, though. Is OP’s home the Starbucks? Does their home have a Starbucks in it? I’m not a coffee person, but I won’t lie, that would be pretty cool.

But, that would negate the point of their being at a college campus, which is how they would’ve connected to eduroam.

Unless their home is a college campus.

But why would they go from dorming at Hofstra to dorming at another college campus just for fall break? That doesn’t make sense.

Anyway, the next part of this meme I’d like to point out is the fact that the screenshot includes Pam singing. I think Pam here represents the OP and probably all college students subject to eduroam’s spotty connection, especially since most college students identify as female. If that’s the case, kudos to you, OP. Spot on. (pun intended)

Speaking of the characters in this screenshot, the fact that Dwight and the random guy in the background are blurred makes me think that they’re supposed to represent eduroam. If this is the case, A++++ description of the connection and its “reliability.” The amount of times I’ve had to force my laptop to connect to eduroam even though I have it set to “automatically connect” is too many, quite honestly.

Unlike AT&T, eduroam does not have reliability you can rely on. Not that it’s accurate of AT&T either (have you tried using AT&T in NY? It’s a miracle if I get more than one bar). I just wanted to make the joke.

Jokes aside though, anyone else find it odd that the OP has the ability to “feel” internet connections? I’m lucky if I have any feelings in the first place, much less the ability to sense Wi-Fi.

Is it an ability they were granted in preparation for the Skeleton Wars?

Anyway, accurate portrayal of eduroam. It does leave me some questions about the setting for this meme and making me wonder why there aren’t schools just dedicated to caffeinated beverages and the Wi-Fi sense ability.

But, I give this meme 201/10 for the amount of effort it took to choose which screenshot would capture not only the nature of OP’s situation, but the eduroam’s existence.

201 because that’s how many episodes of “The Office” there are.