Damn It: The Rats Powering the Third Spur Servers Escaped

Bad news, loyal readers: the rats powering Third Spur’s servers with their exercise wheels have escaped, according to the unpaid interns working in the Third Spur server tunnels. This is sure to be a disappointment for fans of the Third Spur; until the rats are captured and returned to the wheels, the Third Spur website has lost convenient advanced tracking and collection features, and will only be able to support 2 font colors instead of the normal 256.

And that second color is orange!

The servers, located in an undisclosed location deep under the campus of UofSC, have been running nonstop since our news organization’s founding in 1907. The servers made a full changeover to the renewable, rat-sourced energy in 2017 after the previous, coal-burning power plant suffered a catastrophic boiler overload incident (yikes!), necessitating a new power source and new interns.

The rats seem to have escaped through a complex system of tunnels dug out over the course of months in secret during the rats’ mandated 3 hour weekly break times. How ungrateful!

“We’re not sure how exactly they got this intelligent. Most rats never get smarter than the average infant, but these rats were able to work together and not only escape, but hide their escape tunnel under shredded paper and vintage posters,” said lead intern Marcos Smith. “I knew we should have just tapped the power lines to the stadium.”

Staff members were informed of the breakout by a small group of loyalist rats. These rats told us, through a combination of squeaks and forming their bodies into shapes, that the escape was motivated by editorial disagreement with upper Third Spur staff among several of the rats. The ex-Third Spur rats allegedly don’t believe in the merit of satire anymore and decided to go help institutions providing actual services to the university, such as The Daily Gamecock.

The Third Spur has hired several local felines to track down these miscreant rats. At press time, the cats have only served to be a further nuisance by walking all over our keyboa x ie; ‘ brjds