Careful seating plan collapses within four minutes of the first dance
A Carefully Planned Evening Unravels
Eton’s termly joint social with a nearby girls’ school, an event organised months in advance by a committee of Fifth Formers with what one housemaster called “genuinely impressive spreadsheet skills,” collapsed into what attendees are calling “a wall of silence” within roughly four minutes of the opening song. The seating plan, designed to pair boys and girls with supposedly compatible interests based on a pre-event questionnaire, appears to have paired at least one Eton boy with a girl who listed her interests as “debating and dismantling weak arguments,” a combination organisers now concede was “perhaps a little combustible for a first icebreaker.”
The Silence, Documented
Several attendees described the early part of the evening as unusually quiet for an event billed as a social. One boy, asked afterward what he and his assigned partner had discussed, admitted the pair had spent a full nine minutes in what he called “a respectful, mutual silence, punctuated only by both of us checking our watches at slightly different times.” The event’s committee has since promised to review the questionnaire, which reportedly asked prospective attendees to rank their interest in topics including cricket, poetry, and, mysteriously, “regional geology,” a category no one on the committee can now explain the inclusion of.
A Slow Thaw
Things reportedly improved once the buffet was opened, with several pairings finding common ground over a shared bafflement at the catering department’s decision to serve vol-au-vents, a dish younger attendees say they had genuinely never encountered before. The London Prat was granted access to the closing half hour, describing the mood by that point as “cautiously improved, verging on cordial,” a considerable step up from the opening silence.
Organisers Vow to Try Again
Several boys have since suggested the questionnaire be scrapped entirely in favour of simply seating people alphabetically, arguing it could hardly produce worse results than a system that once again matched two entirely silent strangers for the better part of ten minutes. Others have defended the original approach, insisting the interest-based pairing had, on balance, worked reasonably well for most attendees, with only a handful of genuinely awkward outliers dragging down the overall impression of the evening.
The joint social committee has already begun planning next term’s event, with a proposed revision to the questionnaire that drops “regional geology” in favour of what one organiser called “topics an actual sixteen-year-old might have an opinion on.” Both schools have confirmed the event will continue, with staff noting that, whatever its early awkwardness, it remains considerably more popular among pupils than the alternative, which is apparently no joint social at all.
More from this section at Eton College Insight and coverage of the wider school world at The London Prat.
For further reading in a similar spirit, see The Onion and Private Eye.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk
