By Alexandra Valint
Cavalier Daily Associate Editor
Anyone who is cognizant of the mysterious and universal applications of that wonder known as duct tape, will definitely appreciate today's "Duct Tape-Off." The event is part of the Engineering school's E-Week, which started last Sunday and ends today.
Second-year Engineering student Jake Harmon, co-director of E-week, said the preliminaries of the duct tape competition commenced Monday. Ten five-member teams, each representative of a different major within the Engineering school, joined the competition. One member from each team was designated to stand on a chair that was propped against a plywood wall. The other four members had 10 minutes to secure him or her against the wall, using nothing but a lone roll of duct tape.
Originally, the winning team was to be determined by which member could remain taped to the wall for the longest time after the first 10 minutes were up. But "five teams just stuck up there and finally we had to call the event because people had to leave," Harmon said.
The final round of the tape-off is today at noon in front of Thornton Hall. To avoid a tie and increase the difficulty of the event, the five qualifying teams will have less time to fasten their member to the plywood wall.
The teams will have only, "one to two minutes to tape the person to the wall this time," Harmon said. "And then we're going to pull the chairs out from underneath them."
The winner will be the last person sticking.
The first place team will receive the newly designed Engineering T-shirts as prizes. Mugs from the bookstore will go to the second-place winners and the third-place finisher will be awarded key chains.
This particular event of E-Week is sponsored by the Society of Women Engineers, one of the three engineering groups that is assisting the Engineering Student Council in putting on E-Week.
The purpose of the week, Harmon said, "is to heighten the importance of engineering and to promote engineering awareness."
The wacky competition is not so wacky for engineers.
"Engineers can visualize the duct tape," Harmon said. "It's an intrinsic property of engineers."
And as far as taping people to large pieces of plywood with the gray strips of stickiness: "You can just do anything with duct tape," Harmon said.
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