The Spec Roasts: Rodda John

Roddald McJohnald, known as Rodda John to his friends and subordinates, has shocked the world by amassing the most power in the shortest period of time ever recorded in human history. This infamous despot, or as his official title states, “paid intern,” has reportedly mystified and embittered Vishwaa Sofat by becoming the most powerful person in Stuyvesant, without scamming his way into a single Student Union election.

As the Stuyvesant population is left to make sense of how to respond to John’s first grade power trip, we must confront who this enigma really is. Underclassmen will be shocked to learn that the man-boy who has been making their lives a confusing mess is a former student who, despite graduating, has never actually left this school. Instead, like Peeves the Poltergeist but with a superiority complex and the mystical weapons of an IT guy, he has been roaming the school halls, prompting many to ask, “Why is he still here?”

Graduating Stuyvesant High School in 2017, John attended Columbia University to pursue computer science. John was hospitalized shortly after for pulling a 2007 Britney Spears and having a separation anxiety nervous breakdown in the middle of a website development course, claiming he was the descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, “🅱eter Stivysant” Dropping out in the summer of 2018, because nothing he learned in Mr. Holmes’s AP Computer Science class about “Class and Community Participation” helped him, John sought revenge on Stuyvesant High School.

Having attended the school for four long, painful years, John knew exactly what frustrated Stuyvesant students the most: program changes. And with his plan for a new website from the depths of hell, it was sure to be the ultimate plot for revenge. He named it Talos; unlike the giant Greek god who protected Crete, this website did nothing to protect students from the very real agonies of program changes.

After purposely crashing Talos at 9:00 p.m. on August 30, John shut down the program changes tab and went to eat a tub of ice cream as 3,000 students unwittingly reloaded the website, trying to change their schedules. In addition to his job of creating a perfectly unfunctional website, John passed out buttons saying STRAIGHT OUTTA SCHEDULE CHANGES while scanning people into program changes on the first three days of school.

Rather than fixing bugs like the one that erased all the schedule change requests after Talos was shut down, John spent his time thinking of Roman names for the website. He named the locker system Portunus after the god of keys and doors and the internet request tab Argus after the 100-eyed giant.

“Don’t ask me how that second one even makes sense. I’m just here to bring agony and despair,” John said.

The administration eventually appeared to catch on: Talos does not work, does not account for human error, and has a dumb name. Having strayed so far from his original plot, John was genuinely offended. He issued an ultimatum to the school—say his website works and hand over the schedules of all Stuyvesant High School students to him, or all student ID pictures will be released. Also he will quit.

He called after the scheduled meeting, screaming for the students of Stuy to “PRAISE ME” and “WORSHIP MY WORK.”