University Semen Meme Nothing More Than Ghost Load

By Karl Klockars in News on May 17, 2011 2:42PM

It's the kind of thing that's just believable enough to be true, just disgusting enough to be shocking (and amusing), and just official-looking to be...well, official. There's only one problem - it's a total hoax.

A letter has been posted online supposedly from the residency staff of University of Chicago, which reads as follows:

Dear Residents:

We have recently found several blockages in showers in University owned accommodations, mostly caused by human hair.

However, over the last quarter we have found many of these blockages to be caused by large quantities of what we now have determined is semen. This is intolerable. Because semen is not soluble in water, it gets caught in filters, and our system is particularly susceptible to this. This has cost over $7,000 to repair thus far.

Though we know you must "take care of your business", we have never faced a problem of this enormity before. It is because of this, unfortunately, that we must ask you to refrain from masturbating in the shower. May we advise those who wish to masturbate to do so in the comfort of their own rooms, and to dispose of their discharges appropriately.

Thank you for understanding.

Funny, right? Too bad it's been done before.

How do we know it was a fake? Because we almost got taken in by it ourselves a few months back.

This letter seems to come up every now and again, and we stumbled on something similar on Reddit in Feburary. The copy of that letter was extremely similar to the U of C one, down to the request to refrain from "releasing" in the restrooms. We spoke with the residency staff at U of I, and they (somewhat sheepishly) told us it was a fake, and that they'd seen it before. The letter showed up at the University of Washington recently as well, and (of course) a topic on the Snopes forums shows many other examples of this particular prank. Still, it's probably not a bad idea to keep wearing those flip-flops in the showers anyways.

While discussing this on the Chicagoist group, Benjy won the comment of the day by asking, "so next year, this will be an issue at Northwestern and cost $70,000?"

Can you do better?