Opinion: What I Learned From a Month Riding Around Campus on a Razor Scooter

At the start of the semester, I began an audacious experiment. I’d been seeing people riding electric Lime-brand scooters—I’d been almost hit by those people several times—and I was wondering what other modes of transportation could help me cut down on my time going to class… and maybe decrease my chances of getting smoked by an electric motorcycle on the sidewalk.

There was my bicycle, but my training wheels are quick release and I was concerned people would steal them. And I could’ve tried out the skateboard again, but then I thought back to how the skaters in middle school kept making fun of my hair. So I decided I’d go with the classic Razor kick scooter. It gets around quick, it’s easy to maneuver, and it gives you that positively sensual feeling of the foam-padded handlebars, all without having to charge or making annoying blips and boops. Riding my Razor around CU would surely be a dream.

My experience exposed me to an appalling double standard that exists on this campus. While people on Lime scooters can just zoom around as they please, the Razor contingency doesn’t have it anywhere near as easy.

Over the course of the month I was called both “sissy” and “incel.” My entire Introduction to Linguistics class attempted to tar and feather me. Somebody sicced some dog named “Murphy” on me and he ended up chasing me around Kitt Pond for three-and-a-half hours (no one has seen Murphy run that much in a very long time). After the Dean of Students called the police on me for not wearing a helmet, I began to realize why I’d never seen anyone else riding Razor scooters on campus.

It is abundantly clear that the Razor rider is an unwelcome breed here and maintaining that division appears to be at the heart of the collective unconscious of this institution. I haven’t really read Carl Jung but I think this is exactly what he’s talking about. Perhaps a better way of understanding the deep-seated Razorphobia at CU Boulder would be through Louis Althusser’s concept of the Ideological State Apparatus, with Razor kick scooters somehow representing a substantial deviation from hierarchical structures of domination, a deviation that society at large is wired to repress. At least this is how one of my English professors helped me understand it when he saved me from the missiles. I don’t know if I really caught everything. I was mostly just looking at his beard the whole time.

Looking back on my Razor experiment, the whole thing was hands-down the worst decision I’ve ever made. Once my month riding it was over I put a curse upon the infernal vehicle and threw the whole goddamn thing in the dumpster. It’s gone for good and now nobody will laugh at me ever again.