I pit people who are loud late at night

The BBQ Pit
1

The dorm room adjacent to mine has lots of cheerful, gregarious people in it. I know this because my bed is against the wall dividing our rooms, and I can hear them being cheeful and gregarious as I’m trying to fall asleep. I have chronic insomnia, and the shrieking, laughing, and general boisterousity do NOT help matters at all. I’m glad for them that they have friends and all, but I’d be even gladder if I wasn’t sleep-deprived for once.

(To their credit, they did pipe down a bit last night after I knocked on their door in my pajamas and asked them to please kindly be a little more quiet). (What the door was doing in my pajamas, I’ll never know).

2

Ear plugs. I mean, obviously people should quiet down after a certain hour, but… dorm. Ear plugs.

3

Damn those cheerful people! Especially the gregarious ones.

Maybe you can get them hooked on The Pit. After reading all the way through the Paterno thread, and reading “George Zimmerman isn’t necessarily racist” comments…

…they’ll have confronted the seamy underbelly of the human condition, they’ll lose their will to live, and you can get some sleep.

4

Heh. I have the worst, most impossible sensitivities when it comes to sleeping and waking up.

I cannot fall asleep well unless it is completely dark and completely silent. I cannot wake up unless it’s bright and sunny and for a plus I can hear other people getting up. I still have not figured out how pull this one off. I may just be doomed to never having a good night’s sleep.

The light situation in the dorm is worst. The height of the building literally blocks out the sunlight. There isn’t night and day, there’s only “dark” and “slightly less dark”. Not that dark-time is completely dark, because we face another building which naturally has windows and lights itself.

Could be worse. My first year, I was on the second floor facing the street, with my bed under the window. While there was construction going on for the whole semester. That was hellish.

5

You need to get an apartment. Sensitive sleepers cannot stay in a dorm well, and you can’t expect everyone to cater to your sensitive sleeping issues. I’m not being rude, it’s just the way it goes. My SO had the same problem in college.

What used to drive me crazy in college was the fucking basketball. People do not really how loud it is to BOUNCE…BOUNCE…BOUNCE…BOUNCE…sometimes for an hour at a time. I wanted to ram it up his ass.

6

An excellent idea, but could be a problem if you rely on an alarm clock to get up in the morning.

7

I know, I know.

It’s just this is the first year out of five I’ve been kept awake by other people, so I figured they were being particularly loud. I’ll take your word for it that this is normal, though. Maybe this is just the first year my bed was next to the other room’s wall?

8

Try loud nurses and aides. I’ve spent most of the last three months in various hospitals (too long; didn’t write) and it seems like night nurses and aides just don’t care how loud their conversations right outside your door get at midnight. It’s bad enough that there’s a periodic stream of people waking you up at 1AM and 3AM and 5AM to get vitals or draw blood (are phlebotomists literally vampires or something? Something like 90% of my blood draws happened between midnight and dawn) or give a treatment or meds, without the medical staff standing outside your doorway having a loud conversation about Peggy’s kids and how Lisa’s pregnant…again!

9

I’ve owned several different types of ear plugs and none of them have prevented me from hearing my alarm. They don’t completely block out noise though, merely muffle it. While I was on holiday hearing people partying made me feel very serene for some reason and helped me fall asleep…

My friend has a flatmate that claims to have “heavy feet” and when they return from a club at some ungodly hour in the morning decides to practice an assault course on the stairs. Think his options are between soundproofing and euthanasia.

10

Is moving your bed an option?

11

I theorize that you get more and more sensitive to noise, the longer you live in noisy environments like dormitories. I lived in them for four years and never had a noise problem until the fourth… at which point it became unbearable, and I had problems with four different sets of neighbors. Then I moved into a cheap apartment and the hell really began.

By the time I considered trying them earplugs didn’t help, because you can still hear the muffled “wah wah wah” of voices through them and that drove me crazy. FWIW, though, my favorites are the blue Hearos available in almost any drug store.

12

Holy crap, this. Was in hospital three times last year. Had to drag my IV connected butt to the door and slam it shut. And the blood draws, really? You were here like an hour ago. And the noise the IV makes when it runs out of whatever they’re pumping into me. Argh.

I did wear earplugs though.

13

Are you me?

If I ran the world, killing people who are loud after 10pm would be legal.

Earplugs help. They only seem to cut out the low noises, so the high-pitched music from the alarm is alright (and at least for me, they fall out in the middle of the night anyway).

Otherwise, white noise.

14

And the doctors think you’re crazy when you ask to go home early so you can GET SOME REST.

15

Move your bed from the wall. Then, practice falling asleep with a white noise machine or a fan on low/medium speed. You’ll get terrible sleep for a few nights until your brain will make you sleep out of sheer exhaustion. You’ll get used to it. I had to do the same thing myself, and now I’m a much sounder sleeper. In fact, I have trouble sleeping in dead silence now (which isn’t an issue unless the power goes out AND my Kindle Fire’s battery is completely dead, which pretty much never happens).

16

Reminds me of a beautifull moment that happened some years ago.

We have a cottage (built by my dad) on a woodlot north of Barrie, Ontario. Next to the cottage is a county forest with a rather large hill on it - about a quater-mile away. On occasion, bikers like to party on that hill, which is remote enough that cops rarely check it out.

Well, one day we came up to the cottage for some rural R&R, and I noticed a lot of activity on the hill. Turns out, some bikers were preparing for a party. A BIG party. They were hauling what looked like big speakers, a generator and stuff up to the hill.

I was concerned. And I was right to be concerned.

As soon as it got dark, a huge bonfire was lit and the music started up. The sound was very distorted, but very very loud - so much for the ambiance of the woods, all we could hear was a sort of “OOM-pa, OOM-pa, OOM-pa” noise. It was so loud in our cabin you had to talk loudly over it - lord knows how loud it was on the hill.

I was not looking forward to hearing that all night. But then, nature itself came to our rescue!

Without much warning, the weather, which had been perfect all day, changed. A mighty crack of lightning split the sky, followed by a truly torrential downpour of rain. I gather that the bikers had not brought tarps, or otherwise planned for rain, because what we heard then went something like “OOm-pa, OOM-pa OOM-perrrrzziccsnapsquuek”. Then, silence. Only the soothing drumming of the rain on the roof.

After an hour, the rain eased off to a drizzle, but the music did not start up. Nor was the bonfire in evidence. The only noise from the hill was a sort of pathetic “yah-hoo! Yaaah-hooo!” from the die-hards, which only lasted for a couple of minutes.

We slept well that night. :smiley:

17

Ah dorm life. IME loud neighbors were nothing compared to the biweekly 3am fire drills.

18

Yup.

They make some really good earplugs :slight_smile:

ANECODTE TIME! :smiley:

When I was in grad school, I stayed in an older than average dorm. We would get ‘refuges’ from other dorms and one even got down on his knees and kissed the floor when he came in.

He then told me in confidence that his dorm room shared a wall with the TV room. All times of day and night the TV was blaring full blast. He would get up, go over there and no-one there. He’d turn off the TV, go back to bed and a few minutes later…blaring TV. He;d get back up, go over and no-one there. Rinse/repeat.

FInally, he was so tired/sleep deprived that he went over and took a knife and cut the power cord.

He was then shocked to hear the TV come back on full blast. He went over…no-one there. The TV power cord had been spliced back together. He didn’t even think that was possible :D. So he took his knife, cut the power cord up at where it went into the TV, took the remaining cord, went outside and threw it in the bushes.

Next day there were notices for a reward about information leading to the capture of the person who vandalized the TV. A couple days later he got a place in our dorm.

Undergrad dorms are not for light/sensitive sleepers. You will go crazy there.

19

Why, if the above is fully accurate, would you live in the dorm for 5 years? Or 2 yrs even? Or one? If it’s truly been a first in five years, I’d say you’ve had a good run, all up!

I have to say, a second year in the dorm is abnormal around this university town. Usually people get there fill of communal living, with the loud and gregarious, in a year, and move to off campus housing.

I also recommend a white noise of some kind. Or you could get a cell phone number for them and just call, they sound responsive to your complaints, and that way you wouldn’t have to get out of bed even!

20

Most people in dorms for more than 3 years become an RA to help lower their fees and get their own bedroom. But even a typical party apartment complex is much quieter than a dorm during the week. And I’ve never seen a dorm fee that comes close to matching the lower cost of off-campus apartments. You can use your federal loan money to pay for off-campus housing, too. I wasn’t aware of that when I first started college, but I ended up doing it for a couple of years. $330* a month always covered rent plus electric at the three-bedroom apartment I rented, so it was cheaper to stay off-campus year round than it was for one semester in the dorm (which was like $3500* per semester). And they offered individual leases to each bedroom, so I never had to worry about making my roommates pay up or filling their vacancies.

Dorms also force you to buy a meal plan, though, at least where I went to school. That’s part of why they’re so pricey. If you can shop restrainedly for groceries and cook for yourself, the apartment is by far the better deal in terms of cost, privacy, and restfulness. You also don’t need a car if you have a decent bus system on campus (I know I did, our bus even stopped at a Walmart superstore every hour).

*These prices were from back in 2006-2007ish. I understand dorm fees have inflated significantly since then, while apartments are only slightly more expensive.