The Presidential Knob of Confusion

MEDIA RELEASE
For Immediate Release
14 October 2009

The Presidential Knob of Confusion

The Otago University Students’ Association (OUSA)’s Christmas party this Friday sees the continuation of what has become a bizarre OUSA tradition : the passing of the Presidential Knob.

OUSA Life Member, Kyle Matthews, tells the story:

The knob is a historical artifact from the era of 1993 OUSA President Grant Robertson, now MP for Wellington Central. During that year there was a party in his Queen Street flat, which had a stairway with large wooden knobs on the bottom of the bannister.

After this party one of the knobs had disappeared. It subsequently re-appeared at OUSA, anonymously returned to Grant and stayed in the office and forever became associated with the President. It was presented first to Adrian Reeve, the 1994 President. It was intended to have been presented to the outgoing president by the previous year’s President (with an appropriate speech) forever afterwards.

Unfortunately, the 1999 President, Stephen Day, tragically left the knob at the OUSA Christmas party that year and went missing for many years, before being found by OUSA Alumni and Campus Watch member Andrew Wicken in 2007. While OUSA is unsure who took it, it seemed that hiding the Presidential Knob had become a Capping Show cast tradition in the intervening years.

Since 2007, the knob has again been presented to the outgoing OUSA president by a representative of the President of the year before. Rather than a symbol of Presidential camaraderie, however, it is now an amusing source of confusion and embarrassment for the Presidents, whose names are added to the engraved names on the Knob.

In addition to the tradition of the Presidential Knob, the OUSA Christmas Party is also the venue for the presentation of Life Memberships (two, in addition to the President, are to be awarded this year – details unavailable until after the event), and for wagers to be taken concerning the length of the President’s speech. Steven Sutton, the 2006 President, holds the record here with over 40 minutes of inane warbling. We promise that guests at our 2009 xmas party will not be exposed to this level of verbiage…

ENDS

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