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.
Demountables for us
Did you go to Summer Heights High?
Not far off
Portables
Yup, that’s what I was told they were called.
I’m pretty sure ours are still there 23 years later.
I was searching the thread to see if everyone called them that or if it was regional.
Walking through the snow in the Canadian winter from your warm school hallway to the portable for that one class was always torture.
I went to school in Aurora in the 90s but didn’t have to suffer any of these containers. Moved to Virginia and had a bunch of classes in them
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
was really confused how spongebob fit into this story for awhile
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.
It just felt a bit sad and jaded like someone needed to get off internet for a bit but is still addicted lol.
It does give off serious REPOST vibes but… Longer lol.
That sucks man. Hopefully you’ll stop caring one day.
Thank you for well wishes. I’m tormented by reposts nearly as bad as incels are tormented by PizzaCakeComics.
I’m online quite a bit, so really surprised I haven’t seen this one before
So the meme itself is as moldy as the portables? Fitting.
In our town, one of the schools was just built 5 years ago. They built it without classrooms. Not a single one. They had a gym, common areas, admin offices, IT infrastructure (office with a server room became the councillors office and the IT guy needs to ask permission to use it lol), bathrooms and library. They designed it so it could be made entirely with portables. From the onset.
They designed it so it could be made entirely with portables.
wtf…
Right? To be fair, they used some of the nicest portables I’ve ever seen. Two portables to a class, windows, a semi permanent foundation, plumbing, HVAC hookup, networking, the works. I had to install WAPs in the drop tile, and it was not the worst thing I’ve had to do there.
swanky!
Didn’t yall call them “portables”? At one of my first public schools, they had a big long installation called a “portapac”.
Might be a Canadian thing judging from some of the comments.
Here in socal we called them portables.
Same in NM
And my Tex!
My elementary school in Utah, we also called them portables. Ah the memories!
Yar
I remember they had air conditioning when the rest of the school didn’t.
Ours didn’t (in the 1980s). They were hot in summer
Hell the house I live in was also made to be temporary, for factory workers almos 100 years ago
You’re temporary.
I wish all the plastic shit I’ll leave behind me for thousands of years would be more temporary too 😩
Good ole’ “portables”
We called them portables.
Ah yes, the “portables” that never moved. They’re still at my old school, decades after I’ve left they’re still in the same damn spots.
I just checked my old elementary school online. Nearly 40 years later, the same temporary buildings I had class in are still there.
Decades are a temporal unit
Neighborhoods go through booms and busts of school age kids. These are actually a great solution to get through the boom, then you move them to the next booming neighborhood. Though the schools should be designed so they butt up against the main building and you can go down a hallway into them.
One school I went to has like a third the school with them, but they were down a hallway connected to the school. I didn’t even realize they were portables until years later.
That happened when the school refused a number of students. The local politicians didn’t like that and said the school was not allowed to refuse students anymore. When summer vacation came there were a few dozen more students signed in than they’re were chairs in the school. The politicians had no choice but to do some expensive cabin building before school opened for the next year. After that, refusing new students was allowed.
In Norwegian we have this (little known) word ‘permasorium’, describing the everlasting provisions like these.
I like it! In German we call temporary solutions a “Provisorium” and often say that they stay for ever (Nichts hält länger als ein Provisorium). I like the idea of making a permanent Provisorium into a single word!
