False Ceiling

Have you ever wondered what was on the other side of the false ceiling of your high school? You know, those foamy tile things that hung on rails with the florescent panel lights with the pattern of random holes that were really useful for disguising the marks you made trying to get your pencil to stick up there. Those things that soaked up even the slightest drop of water from the leaks in the actual roof and turned brown as if to mark "yeah, here's where the idiots thought they could get away with shooting spitballs into the air."

You know what I'm talking about. Have you ever wondered what those were there for? The roof of the building was like 25 feet up but your classroom ceilings were a solid 10 feet lower than that. What gives? What was the point?

Some of you who either went on to work in schools or other commercial buildings in some form or another, had occasion to go up there because of detention or something, or who threw one of the giant pencils and broke one of the panels in half (those pencils are a subject for another day) are probably rolling your eyes right now as if it's obvious. For me personally I've worked in a few office spaces where that ceiling had been removed for one reason or another, so I'm with you. And heck, even if you've never wondered at that because you have no remaining sense of joy at all (or you were actually paying attention in class like a loser) you may still have reasoned out what the point of that false ceiling is.

It's to hide all the power wiring for the outlets and lights, all the Ethernet cables for networking, and all the ductwork for the HVAC system. They just hang all that stuff from the roof and then put a false ceiling right below to hide it while still keeping it easy to get to if anything needs to be serviced. The false ceiling is a facade that let's us hide all that stuff while still allowing access.

Sort of like people.

No, bear with me.

C'mon Laurence...

 

See, we all have stuff we want to keep hidden, like those wires and vents. So we throw up our own false ceilings (ew) to hide that all away. It's not true repression, of course, we can still get up there to root around through our insecurities, vices, old family Christmas cards we're not sure why we're keeping, etc. But they're hidden away from most people most of the time.

So my question to you, given that we all now understand what a false ceiling is for...

It's uh, to keep things hidden, in case that didn't come through...

So my question to you is why do we have false ceilings?

To keep things hidden, yes, very clever, don't mock my phrasing. What I mean is why do we want to keep that stuff hidden? Why do we put so much effort into keeping our HVAC and our plumbing stuffed away behind something? Think about all the space we're losing by doing this! Six-plus feet of height times the area of the floor, that's the volume equation for those of you actually doing the math because you paid attention in class (losers). All of that space that could be a part of the room.

That could be a part of us.

So tear down the glass ceiling! I mean false ceiling! Probably not in your actual school or place of work, I mean, somebody you work for paid money to hide that stuff and they probably wouldn't be too thrilled with you ripping the tiles down just because you wanted to look at the Ethernet cables. At least that seemed to be the case for my principal when I threw that giant pencil at the ceiling.

What I mean is tear down the false ceiling that is covering those aspects of you that you were keeping hidden. Let your HVAC fly free, let the leaks in your roof drip down on the student's heads. It'll open your soul to new possibilities to grow upwards a few additional feet!

Brought to you by the Foundation for Overly Literal Analogies.