Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Goodbye

Friends, Western students, relentless mockers of Western students, lend me your ears;
I come to bury this Web site…


Yes, that's right. As you may have guessed by the dearth of new posts over the past ten or so months, OAW is dead. Although Western students are, as far as we know, still running around with their brains apparently totally disconnected from their mouths, the sad fact of the matter is that the last of OAW's founding members graduated in the spring of 2008, and we are no longer around to bear witness to the stupid. (Also, we just have crazily busy jobs and no Hotmail access at work.) We have been meaning to say goodbye for quite some time now, so we apologize for our procrastination. With any luck, at least those of you who are students will understand.

To bid you "farewell", we bring you a few things that you may have wanted to know about Team OAW through the years:

  • Its founding members are both female, and both from the same faculty.

  • Although one of us did go to UWO for her undergrad degree, we were not "undergrads" when we were running the site.

  • One of us does, in fact, hold an Ivey degree. Also represented on staff were MIT, Music, and Engineering.

  • Yes, we did periodically post our own conversations. These can probably be recognized as the particularly snarky ones taking place between two or three females.

  • We never, ever made up a single conversation that we put up here. If they were invented by people who submitted material to us, there's not much we can do about that. However, any of you who have ever walked around the UWO campus can probably vouch for the fact that we had more than enough material to work with.
Thanks are owed to the undergrad student we recruited to help us out in our final year. Zac, your brand of snark was a new and refreshing change from ours – sorry we disappeared and hung you out to dry in the end.

Thanks are likewise owed to our best friend, "Deadpan". She was a participant in many of our conversations posted here, and, more importantly, in the conversation that led us to set the site up in the first place.

To our readers: thank you for the three-ish years of laughter, eye-rolling, and comment chains that rapidly escalated to the irrelevant and overly political. We hope we've left you with enough archival material to allow you to go back and reminisce.

To our contributors: we sincerely appreciated every submission we got for the site. No, we didn't post them all. Some of them we didn't get; some of them we didn't think were funny (sorry!); and some of them we just plain couldn't come up with a title for. However, your eavesdropping and emailing abilities were what made this site what it was.

So long, kids. We miss you already, but hey – we'll always have London.

26 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Awww. And I just overheard some grade-A material I was about to submit. :(

All good things must come to an end I suppose. Such is life.

9:41 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

When will all the gay porn be posted to this site?

10:34 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

^^^ That just made my night!!!

10:41 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thank you.

It's been fun.

2:54 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

:-) London stays while we all move on as you say. its been good.

10:04 AM  
Blogger Rev. Bob said...

I love you guys. Well done.

*snif*

12:22 AM  
Blogger Norrdec said...

I loved what you posted here, even though I am from Poland :D Some things were hilarious, no matter where you are from ;)

Goodbye, good luck and thanks for all the fish ;)

10:19 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

meh....

Why you couldn't offer to pass on this site is silly. I am sure there is a student group willing to institutionalize the site and keep it going as a part of Western student services.

Well the facebook group of OH@W is inevitable to take over as it has at Concordia and is start to defeat McGill's OH

11:20 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I'll miss this so much! You guys were great!

9:02 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Love the picture of those two random lesbians. You should have been posting more of those all along.

8:41 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

:( i is sad

11:13 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Why can't you guys pass the site on to new management (as was mentioned above)? I'm sure there would be plenty willing Western students to run this blog for years to come.

9:12 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks for the entertainment over the years.

3:29 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I graduated from Western (for the third and final time) a few years ago, and coming back to this site always made me feel nostalgic about the many years I spent there.

Your site gave me (and many of my classmates) more laughs than I can count.

I implore you to find someone who is currently still in London to take this over and institutionalize the site. It is too good to allow it to die quietly in the night.

12:35 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I too wanted to submit something on here! Only to find out about this. It's been a great run! I'll forever cherish the remnants of OAW through all its archival glory.
Though for old times sake...I'd like to share what I heard a few days ago.

Typical Western Girl #1: I wished I tanned more easily...I hate being white.
Typical Western Girl #2: I know right...why can't we be like, Latina!?
*silence*
Typical Western Girl # 1: Why would you want to be Latina? So you can be poor and get knocked up by some random black guy?

Oh, Western.

1:33 AM  
Blogger Overheard at Western said...

Friends,

We did try to pass the site along. Problem is, it's more labour-intensive to maintain than most people realize, and submissions started to fall off drastically by the end of the 2007-08 school year. This left us with the problem of (1) not having enough material to work with (shocking, I know) and (2) not having anyone willing to commit the sometimes significant amount of time it takes to to sift through the submissions and come up with a dozen or more amusing titles each week. We couldn't very well turn it over to the University or some University club, since, frankly, the site's just not something the University wants to be associated with.

On top of that, we were getting a number of user comments that the site "just wasn't as funny anymore". Ultimately, we were left with the choice of either leaving it to someone who wasn't prepared to commit the effort to it (ensuring that it would turn to garbage anyway), or saying goodbye. Think about your favourite TV shows of the last 10-15 years. Don't you wish some of them had just called it a day and gone out on a high note, rather than sticking around for those last two or three seasons that kind of ruined the show for you?

Apologies to those who are disappointed. Seriously, we've given it a lot of thought, and we think it's better this way. And if someone wants to start another OAW-type site, by all means, let us know via the comments here and we'll prominently post a link.

Keep on mockin',

Team OAW

2:09 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Team OAW,

I find it impossible to fault your logic. You are absolutely right, it IS better to go out at the top of your game, rather than a slow inexorable decline.


Good luck in your respective careers. Hopefully you will find the time to return to London for homecoming, and perhaps you might post a conversation, or two that you overheard.


Cheers,


-The Iveyguy

5:52 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

You will be missed! As a Western Alum, this site has brought tears to my eyes as I clenched my midsection, doubled over in absolute hysterics many, many times.

Absolute classic Western... the memories

You make a good choice to go out on top. I agree with Iveyguy though: drop by for homecoming and surprise us with a new entry or two. Trust me, the alumni may provide better material than you think. Imagine: Girl #1 and Girl #2 who now think they've got some life experience... the possibilities are endless

Good luck wherever you are, in all that you do

Go Stangs Go!

2:56 AM  
Blogger eavesdropwestern said...

the next generation of smarm....

http://eavesdropwestern.blogspot.com

the legacy continues..

2:06 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Don't leave!.. I just found out about this site!

11:32 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Simply put, you guys are great.
Thanks.

10:08 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

This post made me depressed

10:07 PM  
Blogger Jen M said...

This comment has been removed by the author.

3:49 PM  
Blogger Jen M said...

http://stuffmystudentssay.blogspot.com

Or you could just go here and read all the crazy things my students say...

Great blog! Brought me a bunch of giggles. Sad that you're done posting!

3:51 PM  
Anonymous Dating said...

Don't leave!.. I just found out about this site!
Free Online Dating

10:26 AM  
Blogger phoneafriend said...

This is a fun way for you to match with people you might not have normally considered, however after it while it can feel like the system is churning out just about anyone to you.
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11:11 PM  

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