Yeah, we called them “Portables.” They were there long before I came, and will be there long after I am dead. Long live our plywood fortresses.
At least you had windows. My kids are in a pretty new school building, but most of the classrooms are located in the middle of the building without windows and natural light. Seems like another one of those “only in America” things.
I’m sad to report it’s very much not limited to America. My local university had these things pop up to some considerable height because one of the buildings was condemned due to mold. Condemned about three years ago and is still standing. There’s also a number of schools using these things because they burned down or got condemned or whatever, I’m not entirely sure. At least one of those has been going two years longer than it was supposed to.
Not only at the top, there’s also cables at the bottom between sections and what looks like a cable duct mounted in front of it with a bunch of cables coming out at the top
I remember showing up for tenth grade, looking at the list of assigned classrooms in the first day of the school year. Instead of the usual the digit number, it said “C1”. My classmates showed up, and we’re just as confused as I was.
The C turned out to be short for “container”, which we found in a corner of the school grounds.
That said, being able to quickly go outside in every break was pretty neat. And the school actually did get a second building only a few years later.
Walking through the snow in the Canadian winter from your warm school hallway to the portable for that one class was always torture.
Welcome to government funding.
School District: we need a new school
Enrollment: 4200
Government: Awesome, here’s $4.2 million, go build the 4200 student school.
SD: Uhh, won’t that take a few years? Should we add some buffer space to the plan?
Government: ehh, naah
Spongebob 3 years later: Welcome to Springfield High School!
Enrollment: 6900
Springfield: see, gooberment, we needed more classrooms!
Gooberment: heh, would you look at that. Lol. Well, use your budget to build some portables.
SD: Us? Why don’t you pay!?!?
Gooberment: Oh, haha, yeah, that’s an operating expense. We only fund capital projects! Don’t worry, give us a plan to expand and we can fund you in 10 years
10 years later: Ok gooberment, our numbers say we need 15 classrooms. But for the expansion, we should do 25 for future proofing
Gooberment: Oh, but you only need 15 now? Yeah here’s money for 15
2 years later: Here’s 15 classrooms!
SD: We need 25…
Gooberment: Oh, yeah, get some portables and talk to us in a few years!
Rinse and repeat
For anyone interested: This meme has been posted by bots to a Reddit community I was active in back then very often.
A bot would mirror these Reddit posts in a Discord server and because this exact meme has been posted there so often, it became an insider at some point, with various people always posting this meme again (because that was itself funny).
That’s why I can’t take this meme seriously at all.
Why the hell are you taking a meme seriously in the first place. You see it, laugh if it resonates and move on.
laugh if it resonates
That’s what I mean with taking it seriously. You see it and its contents genuinely as the joke it displays.
In our group, it just became a meta-level-joke because we’ve seen it so often by spam bots and the joke was to re-post it as the newest most original joke one has ever thought of (but without it mattering what’s actually on the image); and that was funny.
But reposts trigger me beyond belief! I feel bad downloading them even though we’re on a completely different platform. I can’t control my emotions though so I just had to justify my feelings to everyone otherwise I’d feel bad.
Geez, what are you talking about? I just wanted to share a fun story I remembered when seeing this image.
