Adventures of Dorm Life

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I am a first-year student at a university (you can probably tell which one from my location). I’ve read many an interesting anecdote about dorm life, and now I have a few of my own to share.

Story the First:
Wednesday, around 7:10 PM, I was finishing up my shower. Right as I turned the water off, I heard a very faint, very irritating beeping sound that was also reminiscent of a gym teacher’s whistle. “Oh, crap,” I thought to myself, and my initial thoughts (fears?) were true: it was a fire alarm. I threw my towel on as unexcitedly as you can “throw” something on, and left the comfort and sound insulation of the shower stall. Right as I executed that manoeuvre, the sound increased by at least a power of ten, if not more. I walked quickly, albeit unenthusiastically, back to my room, where I could drop off my shower accessories and pick up my robe. As I was leaving and putting on my robe, the girl who lives next door to me and her boyfriend (who does her laundry for her! but that is a different story…) were also exiting. The boyfriend just gawked at me in my towel as the girl expressed her sympathy for me. I might mention now that I didn’t have time to dry off in the slightest, so I stood outside in a robe, but still soaking wet. I now have these things to be thankful for:

  1. I invested money in a robe.
  2. It is September and not December, and it was an exceptionally warm day.
  3. It began to rain after we re-entered the building.
  4. I do not live in a co-ed dorm.
    Story the Second:
    Last night I was in my warm bed, just about to fall asleep, when my roommate came back from brushing her teeth. “Dude, are you asleep?” she asked. I threw back the covers and asked why. She said, “You’ve gotta see this in the bathroom.” Never being one to miss disgusting bathroom surprises, I went to look. It turns out someone had tried to flush two dead goldfish.

Except she didn’t flush.

And one wasn’t dead.

What was even more disgusting was the fact that it looked like the water had been urinated in. How much do you have to hate a fish to urinate on its still-live body? I felt almost physically ill, and the only thing that kept me from retching was the sheer absurdity of the situation.

This morning when I checked, the fish were gone, and the water had returned to its normal clear state.

2

Ha. Try slipping in your wet feet on the tile floor, crashing to the ground, bruising your elbow, losing your towel, and all this in front of dormmate’s visiting mom.

There was a rash of false fire alarms one year when I was in college. My SO at the time almost got charged, even though he had nothing to do with it, because he had the same hairstyle and a similiar jacket to the person who was spotted tripping the alarm. (That person was caught, eventually.)

That was the same college where the graffito “TOXIC BACON” would mysteriously appear in stairwells and elevators. No, it wasn’t a band name.

3

You have to wonder why bathrooms, the singular room anywhere in any building most likely to have a wet floor, also universally has a floor covering material that gets slipperier once wet.

Might I suggest someone invent rough-textured floor tiles for bathrooms.

4

I can only wish that my dorm’s fire alarm was at such a volume that I could walk unenthusiastically to get away from it. Ah, the excruciatingly high pitched whistle accompanied by strobe lights in the hallways…followed shortly thereafter by the sirens of the door alarms when people go out through the alarmed doors.

People tend to form lynch mobs once they get outside. “WHO BURNED THE POPCORN??!?!?!?!” It’s really the only downside of having a kitchen in the building. That, and having a bunch of perfectly intelligent people with no common sense whatsoever, because you can call campus police and tell them there’s no fire so they can turn off the alarm before it spreads to the entire building.

5

I’m not fond of the 3 am fire alarms.

6

Am I the only person who ever spent two years in college dorms and never dealt with any middle of the night fire alarms?

The only strangeness I ever remember was a guy next door who had a fondness for electric guitars.

7

I lived in dorms that had rather enthusiastic fire alarms, as well. Freshman dorm - 13 fire alarms in two days. We were told it was ‘dust in the system’.
Sophomore dorm - all in all, not too bad. I don’t recall too many false alarms but they were unbelievably loud. And the strobe lights. The strobe lights tended to malfunction and be on for several days at a time. Trying to turn them off set off the whole system, so we dealt with the strobes.
Senior year - lived in an ‘off campus’ apartment (still college owned). It was one of those buildings that if there was a real fire, it would’ve gone up in a second leaving only the steel fire doors on the ground. And while they were unbelievably loud alarms if you were in most of the apartment, you absolutely Could Not hear them in the bedroom. We ended up having a special fire drill just so the Residence Director could go into our bedroom and verify that in fact, you couldn’t hear them there. It was rather bizarre as this was not exactly a sturdy, thick walled building.

Fully acknowledging that there’s no Universal College Experience, I think that dorm fire alarms and a general lack of parking are about as close as we’ll ever come to defining one.

8

When I was in the dorms, at one meeting we got a strong advisory that the fire escape locks (which could be opened from the inside by breaking a part) were not to be opened except during a real fire, as it cost money to replace the part.

We had fire drills once a month. The odd floors were to go out the east staircase, the even floors were to go out the west staircase. The floor reps would know about the drills and release the locks in advance.

A couple of days after the meeting, the alarms went off. (Issue: they were extremely loud and went: blaaaaaast.blaaaaaaast.blaaaaaaast with such brief pauses that any communication was almost impossible.) We started out toward the west staircase, but the lock was on the door. The floor rep was yelling that it was just a drill and not to break the lock.

So we obedient good citizens turned back and headed down the hallo to the other staircase; when we got there the ones coming down from above shouted it was a real fire, and we had to go to our right stair. So we all went back down the hall to the west stair, where they were yelling that it was just a drill. At that point, the person at the door broke the lock and everyone went down the nearest staircase.

Afterwards it was explained that yes, it was a real (wastebasket) fire, and the misinformation was provided by the authorities so we wouldn’t panic. That was my first introduction in life to authorities screwing up a potential emergency.

9

I have a very clear memory of one fire alarm we had in uni. A girl I didn’t know showed up outside, dripping wet and only in a towel, and the guys were trying to twitch the towel away.

November, in Toronto. Jerks.

For reasons I will never comprehend, I was carrying my terry-towel robe. Alarm went off, I took it with me.

Grateful doesn’t begin to cover her reaction. The same guys got a huge kick out of my roommates and I in a group hug around this girl who was shivering, even with the robe.

10

I was in college back in the days when people would do really stupid things while using various illegal substances, and a favorite was to take a large trash back, twist it up really tight, and then set it alight over a wastebasket of water, so that they could then sit around and ooh and aah over the colored blobs falling off the burning trash bag. (What can I say? We were easily amused.)

We’d had several fire alarms during one week, and when another one went off the typical hallway argument started: “Are we supposed to leave our windows open or closed? Doors open or closed?” When suddenly, in the midst of it, someone comes running down the hall yelling, “It’s a REAL fire!” It was pretty funny to watch the panic that ensued.

I was, however, grateful that the fire was only confined to the one room where the trash bag was being burned. I went off and left FIVE end-of-semester papers that I had just finished typing (on a typewriter – remember those?) sitting on my desk. My whole semester’s work would have been fried.

11

Where to start?

The rotten pumpkin thrown down the center stairwell. It smelled for weeks, and did not mix well with the smell of the cleaning solution used to clean it up.

Multiple late night fire alarms, one caused by some people lighting off fireworks surrounded by tubs of ice cream in the hall. On newly-replaced carpet.

Eggs on windows, lots of pot smoke wafting around, many blackouts.

During one blackout, the fire alarm kept making irregular clicking sounds for hours. click…click…clickclickclickclickclick…click. click.
AGGGHH. Presumably this was so we could find the alarm in the dark in case of a real fire, but it was incredibly annoying. We had a false fire alarm that night, I think someone pulled the alarm just to try to make it stop clicking (it worked, BTW).

On the more positive side, I attended a party in a dorm lounge that involved two kiddie pools full of water, squirt guns and hula hoops. And no alcohol involved. I think the security guy lets us keep it going only because “wellness” people were generally responsible and didn’t cause problems.

We also had some very nice dinners in the dorm kitchens and would share food with passersby, making them very happy.

12

In my fourth year I lived in brand-new uni block on one of Edinburgh’s main streets. The lock on the front door lasted all of about two weeks (probably kicked in by pissed students coming home), and as a result anyone could wander in and smash the very obvious “Break Glass” fire alarms by the front door, then run before being caught. Students not being popular with the locals, this happened a lot.

It was bad for me; I was preparing for finals (most of the residents were first years) and the alarms would go twice a night every night for about a month. Of course, some residents didn’t help themselves, smoking in rooms with smoke detectors, and the smoke detectors were hyper-sensitive (burnt toast? call the fire brigade!) as well as being automatically linked to the alarms and to the Manchester fire service (why them, as opposed to the Edinburgh fire service, was never explained). It got so bad that the fire brigade started charging us £375 a go for false call-outs.

What else?

The human faeces on the stairs of Baird House, Pollock Halls, in my first year;

A friend called “Nevs” accidentally setting fire to someone else’s flat by stumbling home drunk, getting lost, finding what he thought was his flat, putting a pie in the oven, getting lost again and discovering he’d left the oven on in someone else’s house;

My flatmate getting collared for drying out magic mushrooms on top of the boiler; a foolproof plan, until we had to call a British Gas engineer out to fix the boiler;

Climbing through a friend’s window, unscrewing his door-handle from the inside, trashing his room, then shutting the window again on the way out, so that he was trapped inside that night;

Watching a very good friend of mine break another friend’s arm in an ill-advised attempt at drunk arm-wrestling in the student union;

All rather sad in hindsight, but enjoyable at the time.

13

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Kakofonous *
**I lived in dorms that had rather enthusiastic fire alarms, as well. Freshman dorm - 13 fire alarms in two days. We were told it was ‘dust in the system’.
**[/QUOTE

That sounds like my sophomore dorm. Only they told us it was “water in the system” and this was in Maine. In January. It sucked.

14

I’m currently a sophomore living in a dorm. Off the top of my head the weirdest things that I can think of would be:

  1. The guys that ripped a drinking fountain out of the wall on every floor (4), and managed to flood my floor. They were seen on the top floor, but when confronted about it they said that they had seen the other two floors and just wanted to “see how hard it actually was.”

  2. Somebody decided to play drunken chair throwing off the roof and hit somebody on the ground with a sturdy dorm room chair.

  3. A soccer player from another school went into our kitchen and turned all the gas all the way up and left it. If I recall, I think he got in a bit of trouble.

15

Aaah yes the 3:00am fire alarm. I lived on the 17th floor. Every floor had double stairflights (they were tall floors) and they would not turn the elevators back on afterwards as punishment so by the time you climbed what ended up 34 flights of steps you were sweaty, achy and wide awake!

I was so happy to move to a dorm with only 4 floors!

16

Due to some form of stupidity, we had an informal fire alarm drill at 1am on a Saturday during my first year at university. Unfortunately I only heard about this the next afternoon coping with a massive hangover:eek:. I’ve cut down on drinking since then.

Another time, some drunkard fell out of a third story window. A week later he found out that he had a minor fractured in his neck.

17

Oh, happy, happy days! Yep, been there done that, with the middle of the night fire alarms- but my experiences were in England- wierd, seems this must be some universal rite of passage all people who live in dorms have to go through. In our case, the main culprits were the usual suspects- burnt toast, jazz cigerettes ( there weren’t actually smoke detectors in the rooms, but the resident pot-head party room had a smoke detector right outside the door) and, more unusually, these weird water boiler thingies that they had on the walls in the kitchen right next to my bedroom.

People would go in and turn them on and then wander out and forget about them all the time, eventually causing them to boil like crazy and send big billowing clouds of steam towards the smoke detector. Luckily our kitchen had an early warning system, which gave you about 2 minutes of localised alarm before the whole building was alerted. If I could of been paid for every time I had to rush in there and switch the darn things off…

Worst thing that happened to me during fire alarm- after being awoken in the midle of the night by very LOUD fire alarm, and being in a somewhat hazy frame of mind after a night out, I wondered into the kitchen to find that my nearest fire escape had recently been fitted with one of those little glass tubes that signify it is only to be unlocked in an emergency. Normally these should be accompanied by a little metal hammer, but in this case it was missing, so after a few seconds of waying up the pros and cons, I decided that I didn’t want to slog all the way over to the next nearest fire exit with all that earsplitting noise,and hey, they do that kind of thing in the movies all the time without getting hurt, I broke it with the edge of my hand. Luckily somebody knew where the first aid box was.

Best (innocent) fun we had in the dorm- sliding down the staircases on sleds made out of metal trays and mattresses, Jackass style ( but before Jackass was invented- yep, that was our very own idea- ah, college life- where great young minds are moulded)

18

I still remember when I was moving into my dorm freshman year, and my very, very conservative, staid, and just plain uptight father took one look at the open tiled stairwell that ran from the fourth floor to the basement and sighed nostalgically, “Oh, for a cherry bomb!” :eek:

Turns out he would do things when in college back in the early '40s like wire Model T batteries to doorknobs and (of course, he being a U of Texas Longhorn) stripping Aggies (students from Texas A&M, in case you don’t know of the legendary hatred between Longhorns & Aggies) dumb enough to get caught on campus and running their clothes up the flagpole.

But oh, that moment of revelation when he saw that stairwell…

19

My dorm has had a few interesting incidents:

  1. Our elevators are somewhat old and problematic. (thankfully im on the 2nd floor) When overloaded they get stuck between floors, sometimes for hours at a time. The door will also open on a floor, then, as people get out the elevator will jerk up and head to the next floor with the doors still open, causing daring fools to dive out at the last second.

  2. In a drunken daze, an aquaintence of mine was trying to get back to his room. Being totally plastered, he didn’t know where the hell he was. His room was on the 6th floor, and he was on the second. He found a room that was unlocked a couple rooms down from mine. Somehow he made it up into the loft without breaking his neck. My roomates friend who lives in that room, happened to be passed out in that bed at the time. He woke up at about 3 or so and noticed the guy in his bed. “what the hell?!” he thought it was his roomate, and decided he was NOT going to deal with this right now, so he got out of the loft to sleep in his roomates loft, only to find that his roomate was sleeping in a chair on the floor. Needless to say, this was confusing, but he decided to go sleep in his roomates loft and deal with it in the morning. When they woke up the kid the next day, he responded by saying “what the hell are you doing in my room,” then, as he looked at the wall, “that’s not my poster!”

  3. This is the biggest class my school has ever had, and they did not have enough room, so there has been some improvisation. One of the girls found her room to be the kitchen for the floor she was on. She claims it’s nice because it is actually quite large. They are currently wiring it for ethernet and tv.

20

powderific, are you at the University of Kentucky? That sounds just like something that would happen here.

I finally got out of the dorm this year. That was a terrible experience.

Everyone that says you should live in the dorms for one year is just lying because they want you to suffer like they did. :smiley:

For a taste of my dorm life, here’s my Pit rants:

This dorm f*****g sucks.

The Terrorists Have Won in Lexington