Dorm Horrors

I am going to Reed next year (I love saying that; it makes me so happy, it was my first choice). Did anyone go there? Does anyone know what the dorms there were like?

Lapin wrote:

Penguin wrote:

Lapin wrote:

Penguin wrote:

(Horrors of Texas)

Yeah, I was considering the Air Force....thanks for putting me in the Navy camp.

WHAT HAVE I DONE

Seriously, the Air Force is great as long as you never go to Sheppard.

No worries, my grandfather would die of shame if I ever joined the Air Force, considering he was a Navy officer. The Air Force just seemed like a "I'm so scared of the fucking ocean" option. Because I'm scared of being on boats and of being in the ocean.

Fair enough. It's a double-edged sword though. In the Navy, if you want to make rank, you have to be on a boat of some kind. Shore duties are where careers go to die. But being on boats, by all accounts, loses its luster when you go out for to sea for the Nth time and have to re-grow your sea legs each time, and then some idiot flushes a shirt in the head and floods many compartments with shit.

I've never had to stay in a dorm during my time at uni, however, I'm grateful that I haven't had to. Being a non-drinker in Australia is a death sentence, particularly if you're going to stay on campus at a uni. I had the misfortune of getting stuck overnight in one last year though after a late-night club meeting and some flash flooding that ended up cutting the whole uni off from civilisation. I can definitely say that wasn't one of the best nights I've ever had...

Freshman year: someone puked in a laundry basket and decided to just...stick it in a trashcan to stink up the whole hallway.

Sophomore year: ACHTUNG BABY'S SERIES OF EPIC FAILS. Let's see. I actually accurately followed the instructions on a batch of microwave popcorn and set off the fire alarm, which led to a fifteen-minute evacuation of the whole dorm at 10pm. Also, I stubbed my toe really hard while drunk, it started bleeding, I didn't notice, and trailed blood all over the hallway carpet. I DID clean it up myself, though.

For some reason, all of my life's failures were consolidated into the first semester of my sophomore year of college. There's plenty more but those are the only two that are dorm-related.

Junior year: I lived in a decrepit, Soviet-era dorm for a semester in Hungary. The (mostly empty) hallway resembled a level from Resident Evil, especially when I used a flashlight to go to the bathroom at night. Why a flashlight? The cleaning ladies turned out the lights to save money.
I actually lived in a gorgeous, brand-new dorm while in Japan. The only problem was people who didn't clean their dishes. Also, this one guy from Vietnam cooked EVERYTHING using fish sauce. The stench was so foul I couldn't even stand in the kitchen without feeling nauseated.

Senior semester (I graduated a semester early): I was doing my laundry one night, and some idiot left their clothing in the dryer after it was finished. Common protocol is to remove the clothing and place it on top of the washing machine- a clean surface, not the floor. An hour later, I went back up, this bitch had opened the door on the dryer so that my clothes were still damp, and left a note that said "Can't you wait five minutes before touching a girl's underwear?". I indulged the passive-aggressive note warfare by putting another note that said "75% of this building is female", which is true- four same-sex suites of four people apiece, and three of them were inhabited by women. A brief while later, there's a note that says "My girlfriend is female", which was either someone fucking with us or some asshole needs to send his girlfriend back to her own dorm to do her laundry. The final note? "WTF is this? I did the lights for Nickelback". To which I desperately wanted to respond "I wouldn't brag about that", but didn't.


So...anybody got Army advice? I'm applying for OCS right now.

Last year I lived in an all-girls dorm and for the most part it wasn't too bad, except the building is kind of old. So the walls are insanely thin, thinner than Dutch walls, which in my opinion are already pretty fucking thin. My neighbor was rather loud and her boyfriend practically lived in her room, even though his room was just across the rez compound, less than five minutes away. They liked to have sex or talk, really late, and loudly. For three months straight I was almost every night knocking on her door asking them to keep it down, which they did for 20 minutes. My breaking point came during finals period when it's supposed to be silent after 6pm. Thankfully her grades slipped and she had to commute from home second term. Bitch, your own fault. My new neighbor was delightfully quiet, I only had to ask her keep it down once and that was because I had two exams the following day, and when she saw me afterward she apologized profusely.

In our building the pipes went wonky during the winter, so if you wanted a hot shower you had to have two on to get hot water. And out of four stalls only one was good, as in not clogged with long hair. Seriously people did not pick up their hair afterward and I know it wasn't mine since mine is short and blond while everyone else had long, black hair.

This year I'm living in apartment style housing, which is better, except in my building we have two elevators, one was broken for about 3 months. I live in the 13th floor, most days I walked down and some times I walked up. We had people who took the elevator down from the fourth floor, I had to bite my tongue so hard. Additionally, some people don't know how to cook, only once has the fire alarm been an actual emergency (boiler burst and three floors got flooded, as in water pouring out from light fixtures) other times people burning food and stupidly opening their unit door to air it out. The thing is, if the fire alarm goes off within your unit, you fan under it and open the windows, you open the hallway door and smoke pours out, you set off the entire building of eighteen floors. Half the time people don't evacuate anymore.

In my unit our floor started leaking, in our living room. First we had a mystery yellow stain, we had it cleaned and then in December a large wet spot appeared that could not have been caused by any of us since it took over most of the carpet, they never came to fix it. And now we have another large yellow stain, but hey at least it ain't wet anymore.

There's this guy who sometimes plays his trumpet out on the lawn at 2am. I kind of like him, though.

When my sister went to college, she was required to live in a dorm, so she had some horror stories--especially about the guys who would walk down the hall, pissing on the carpet as they went. If a door was open, these guys would try to come in and piss on the carpet in the room.

The college wound up having to replace the carpeting (which had been brand new at the beginning of the year).

Aside from an incident with a condom outside my door I only vaguely remember (it was just lying on the floor), my worst experiences involved the fire alarms. Not only did my dormmates set it off (on purpose) enough to get the police involved, but it broke one night. And when I say broke I mean it went off almost continuously between 1am and 7am. They eventually just gave up and told us to ignore it while they tried to fix it, but have you ever tried to drown out a fire alarm with just your pillow? And this was pretty near finals, I believe. Other than that, though, it wasn't too bad.

My worst experiences were, thankfully, a shitty roommate and the fire alarms going off fairly often because of morons burning popcorn. Well... except for this one time. I had volunteered as an usher for the theater and was standing outside when I heard fire trucks. I didn't think too much of it until students started showing up. They said it was my dorm, and that there was a real fire. So I got to usher while wondering if any of my stuff would still EXIST when I got done with it.

Thankfully, it was contained to one room, which was still habitable once it was cleaned. Some moron had left a candle burning when she left for the weekend.

Lady Anne wrote:

guys who would walk down the hall, pissing on the carpet as they went. If a door was open, these guys would try to come in and piss on the carpet in the room.

WHAT

I spent three weeks at the University of Central Florida for an English course.

Cockaroaches.

You have no fucking idea of how many fucking shitty little bastards there were. The walls were rough enough for them to climb and so was the ceiling. There was one in the microwave oven when I opened it (not that I kept any food in the room). The beds had no frame - a mattress on the floor and another mattress on the first one. I never dared to move them for fear of finding the mother nest.
I complained every day before going to lessons and every afternoon whenI came back. It was July and the campus was empty, but we weren't given another room (no one else had the problem: turned out our door was missing a piece of rubber and wasn't roachproof). The staff was too busy playing volley and showing off at the pool.
I hope some zesty college student torched the little buggers alive and set fire to the whole shithole in the process.

In Verona, first-years living in the Student House carry all their belongings in a bag like hobos. The seniors have copies of the keys and ransack their rooms every day. If you lock the door, they break in and do worse.

The Unoriginal wrote:

I spent three weeks at the University of Central Florida for an English course.

Cockaroaches.

You have no fucking idea of how many fucking shitty little bastards there were. The walls were rough enough for them to climb and so was the ceiling. There was one in the microwave oven when I opened it (not that I kept any food in the room). The beds had no frame - a mattress on the floor and another mattress on the first one. I never dared to move them for fear of finding the mother nest.
I complained every day before going to lessons and every afternoon whenI came back. It was July and the campus was empty, but we weren't given another room (no one else had the problem: turned out our door was missing a piece of rubber and wasn't roachproof). The staff was too busy playing volley and showing off at the pool.
I hope some zesty college student torched the little buggers alive and set fire to the whole shithole in the process.

Welcome to the South.

Oh, yes, I have fond memories of the bugs in the old paper-and-cardboard house I lived in for ten years here in Georgia. Let me tell you, in the South, if your house is any kind of old, there's no getting rid of those fuckers. They're everywhere. The best solution we found was bug-bombing the place so not only did it kill any of the ones inside, but for a couple months afterward, if they tried to enter any rooms inside, they'd crawl over the leftover poison and die.

But still. I have so many terrible stories of my family's war on cockroaches. Luckily, our new house does not have this problem, as it was stripped and completely remodeled before we bought it.

Penguin wrote:

The Unoriginal wrote:

I spent three weeks at the University of Central Florida for an English course.

Cockaroaches.

Welcome to the Southern US of A.

Fix'd.
I've been 'south' in other countries (not to mention north when north is worse than south), but that was the only time roaches acted like they owned the place.
Is it a different species? Are they radioactive mutants? Are they on welfare? Really.

The Unoriginal wrote:

Penguin wrote:

The Unoriginal wrote:

I spent three weeks at the University of Central Florida for an English course.

Cockaroaches.

Welcome to the Southern US of A.

Fix'd.
I've been 'south' in other countries (not to mention north when north is worse than south), but that was the only time roaches acted like they owned the place,

Not really. There's only one place on earth where "the South" is referred to in a tone that either describes it as the Promised Land, or that "South" is merely a stand-in for a wide variety of S-words.

The Unoriginal wrote:

Penguin wrote:

The Unoriginal wrote:

I spent three weeks at the University of Central Florida for an English course.

Cockaroaches.

Welcome to the Southern US of A.

Fix'd.
I've been 'south' in other countries (not to mention north when north is worse than south), but that was the only time roaches acted like they owned the place.
Is it a different species? Are they radioactive mutants? Are they on welfare? Really.

I honestly don't know why they're so prevalent. I think the environment is just perfect for them. Often like a sauna, with lots of water sources, nice and warm, with fairly easy winters.

Penguin wrote:

The Unoriginal wrote:

Penguin wrote:

The Unoriginal wrote:

I spent three weeks at the University of Central Florida for an English course.

Cockaroaches.

Welcome to the Southern US of A.

Fix'd.
I've been 'south' in other countries (not to mention north when north is worse than south), but that was the only time roaches acted like they owned the place,

Not really. There's only one place on earth where "the South" is referred to in a tone that either describes it as the Promised Land, or that "South" is merely a stand-in for a wide variety of S-words.

What about Vietnam?

South Vietnam no longer exists.

I commute to school, so I don't live in the dorms, but I've heard some things about them that make me glad I don't live there. The elevators tend to break down a lot, which is pretty terrible for people living on the higher floors. Because the school's built over a bunch of hills, walking to and from classes is a nice workout. I don't think I'd like it if after walking around campus a bunch I'd have to climb five flights of stairs.

Also, the buildings on campus are pretty old, and the heating system's pretty crazy. When it's on, shit gets hot. Really hot. And it's this terrible, dry, nosebleed-inducing heat. It's bad in class, but I can only imagine what having to live in that is like.

And inexplicably the one floor's decorated with pictures of perfume bottles. [You must be registered and logged in to see this image.] Not too sure about the reasoning behind that.

Yeah, I think I made the right decision in riding the bus to school instead of living there.

My first year of university was spent living in a building with a fair share of weirdness and annoying stuff. For example, I had to listen to a lot of other people's conversations (person-to-person or telephone) as they seemed incapable of shutting their doors or staying in their frakking rooms. There was one guy in particular who seemed to always pace up and down the corridor while having long conversations on his mobile - on one memorable occasion I opened my door and nearly stood on him because he was lying on the floor outside. You've got a room with a door, dumbass, use it instead of making the rest of us listen to your private (but uninteresting) chatter!

In a similar vein, once several of the other people on my floor were watching football (or something) on TV in someone's room and, naturally, the victory celebrations spilled out into the corridor. This wouldn't have been so bad if one person hadn't shouted "FUCKING GET IN THERE!" over and over again in almost the exact same tone of voice for about five minutes. It was like listening to a stuck record or the adverts on Classic FM.

One guy on my floor in that building was also one of those annoying political types one finds in any university. Besides pestering people with his attempts to get people to vote for him in student elections (I regard student politics as a total waste of time, so I was unimpressed), he actually made the university newspaper when he plastered his entire window with Labour Party posters. Unfortunately, his room was directly over the main public entrance to the college*, so he was forced to take them down as he was making it look like the college was taking a political stance which it wasn't.

After that, things settled down, although during my postgraduate years, when I was again staying in college accommodation (warning: possible TMI ahead), someone effectively blocked the toilet with what must surely have been the largest turd ever produced by a human. This caused the cleaners to rebel and leave a sternly worded note on the door (removing the deliberately humorous one I'd left referring to the turd as an eldritch horror from beyond infinity in an effort to get the guilty party to do something about it). Of course, it would have helped if they hadn't removed the toilet brush sometime earlier (presumably in an effort to avoid having to clean it...).

*Note that I don't use 'college' and 'university' interchangeably here - I went to a university that's divided up into colleges which act as halls of residence but also have an academic role.

Keith Fraser wrote:

someone effectively blocked the toilet with what must surely have been the largest turd ever produced by a human.

Then what do you call Celebrian?

...sorry. I'll play myself off.

The worst I have experienced from my college days is some vomit on the bathroom floor and a guy in the other room who left his alarm on when he wasn't there so it would wake me up and never stop ringing.

For the most part I love my dorm, except for the people under me who play music so loud that the bass can be heard all the way down the dorms. And then there's the stoop. The stoop is where the smokers go, usually at night, to hang out and smoke. And they like to do this very very loudly, at 3 am. Right outside my dorm.

One time it got so bad that I just stood outside and stared at them until they noticed me and got quiet. Then I went back inside. They shut up.

Also the midnight tennis playing against the walls of my dorm. Ugh.

Blooferlady wrote:

One time it got so bad that I just stood outside and stared at them until they noticed me and got quiet. Then I went back inside. They shut up.

This sounds fantastically creepy, and I have the most wonderful picture in my head of tiny you being really ridiculously intimidating in this very moment.

ily bloof

AgentKaz wrote:

Also, the buildings on campus are pretty old, and the heating system's pretty crazy.

The cocaine addict responsible for this horror...

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

...FORGOT to add the heating system.
Just imagine in the first winter: the janitors calling to ask where the boiler room is so they can turn off the heating.
"The heating? What heating?... oh, shit."

So they patched it up by adding these EXTERNAL METAL PIPES carrying supposedly hot air from the basement to the other stories. On a windy day in winter (we're talking more than 60 knots here) temperatures of less than ten Celsius have been registered in the upper classrooms, while students on the ground floors pass away from the heat.

The basement itself, where the laboratories are, has no heating whatsoever. A picture on the local newspaper portrayed two dozen students wearing labcoats with scarves and gloves, while the professor held out a partially poured Petri dish, still connected to the agar bottle via an umbilical cord of solidified gel.