Share your awful dorm experience here

[space cadet]

Okay, so there's this guy on the floor below me, and whenever the fancy strikes him he pokes his head out into the stairwell and lets out this inhuman, concrete-shattering belch. He does this several times a day and it's really starting to grate on everybody's nerves. I've asked him nicely and not-so-nicely to stop making disgusting sounds in the stairwell, but he pretty much just laughs in my face.

The other night I was up late with my fiance trying to work on my final project before graduation, and sure enough, he poked his head out into the stair well and let 'er rip. That was the end of our patience; my fiance (who lives in the apartment accross the hall from me) yelled down the stair well at the belcher to knock it off. The guy was really sassy and obnoxious, and they exchanged a few angry words before Evan slammed the door shut (even with the door shut you can still hear it though).

A few short minutes later, one of my roommates came up the stair well and noticed a note taped to my fiance's door. Her boyfriend lives in the same apartment, and being curious she opened it to see what it said. I'm not sure what it said or what was depicted on the paper other than the fact that it was pornographic, but she and my other roommate who accidently saw it were both pretty traumatized. Evan went downstairs to talk to the guy about it, but he denied the whole thing, even though the timing is just too coincidental for me to believe he didn't know anything.

I hate freshmen who just come to school to party and have no respect for anyone who might actually want to get some studying done. Why do their parents pay for them to just waste their time like this? It makes me sick.

Anyway, rant over. Thank goodness I'm graduating next week.

[Maksutov]

Back in my day it was all male/all female dorms.

I helped with a few "awful" dorm experiences.

For example I noticed that the architects had designed the place (unintentionally perhaps) such that the urinals (with the door open) could be seen from the reception room. Anytime someone we didn't like met his date there, guess what "accidentally" happened?

Then there was the night one of the dorm's least favorite residents helped us validate the old "asleep with hand in cold water" folklore. It's not folklore.

Way back then we had housemothers. Superglue had just been invented. The college maintenance crew had to remove her through her window since they couldn't open her Superglued door.

Ah, what times...sub-animal house.

http://img394.imageshack.us/img394/4879/iconbiggrin1kg.gif

[mickal555]

Burn down his dorm/room.

[space cadet]

Burn down his dorm/room.

I would, if I didn't think it would prevent me from graduating next Saturday.

[OptimusShr]

The worst thing that happened to me at my dorm was a fire alarm going off at 3 am because some one burnt popcorn.

[Maksutov]

The worst thing that happened to me at my dorm was a fire alarm going off at 3 am because some one burnt popcorn.Man, what wild and crazy times to tell your children!

Maybe they might make a movie out of it!

Popcorn House

starring

John Poplushi
Coren Allen
Tim Popperson
Tom Husk
John "Pops" Vernon
Bruce McSilk
James Daughtpop

and of course,

the old maid.

The director's cut includes never-seen-before scenes with PoptimusShr!

[Gillianren]

Ha! Our fire alarms went off because of cooking mistakes all the time!

No, my worst dorm experience is far worse than that, though it takes a bit of time in the telling.

My first year at Evergreen, I had specifically requested Alcohol-Drug Free (ADF)/Quiet Housing. This is partially because I just don't drink/use drugs/make hideous amounts of noise, and partially because, even if I did, Mr. Sleep is your friend.

The dorm in which I lived was basically laid out like apartments. Ours was five bedrooms, a shower room, a room with a toilet and sink, an extra sink, and a smallish living room/dining room/kitchen. Logically, I therefore had four roommates, and we all shared the common areas.

Three of my roommates were nice, intelligent, mature people, and then there was Nadia and her boyfriend Chuck. Chuck counts, because he moved in. (We asked our Residence Assistant if we could get kicked out because they were violating the rules, and he assured us only she could--Chuck not only was male in a female apartment but didn't pay for it and was not, in point of fact, a student at the college.) I'm pretty sure Nadia asked at least one of my other roommates, but she sure as anything didn't ask me.

So our roommate Wendy ended up doing Nadia's dishes, because otherwise, they'd mold over in the sink, and we all agreed doing them for her was preferable. Alyssa-from-upstairs came in one night to talk to Vanessa or Wendy, and she said the pot smoke was so thick in our room that you could've cut it with a knife. (Remember, ADF housing.) She made too much noise. She smoked in the apartment, even though the five of us (four nonsmokers and Nadia) had worked out that we would be smoke-free.

For me, the final straw was when I got out of the shower to find Chuck's underwear on my towel--which did, yes, teach me to check before getting in the shower in the future--and the other three had hit that point as well. For Vanessa, if I have the sequence of events right, it was that Nadia had left a bottle of Jolt in the freezer until it exploded some days earlier and hadn't cleaned it up, so there was broken glass and frozen soda all over the freezer.

So Anna, Vanessa, and I (Wendy wasn't in town) sat together in Anna's room and worked out that, no, really, none of us could take it anymore. We were going to talk to Seamus, our RA, about her, but we talked it over ourselves first just to be sure that we all agreed.

Nadia apparently overheard some of this. Certainly she cleaned up the Jolt and glass that day, though she cut her hand and left the blood on the door of the freezer for three days until Vanessa sat down and made her clean it. However, Anna had a boyfriend who'd been visiting us overnight and such as well--though far, far less often than Chuck. So Vanessa and I took a few minutes to assure Anna that, no, Phil was great; Phil was the best person in the world. (He was a pretty nice guy.)

So later, Nadia, who was half Filipino and half Hawaiian, as I recall--as was Chuck--left a note on our whiteboard on the front door sayin, "We like Phil because he's white." Now, both halves of that were true--we did like Phil and he was white--but there was no real causation there. We liked Phil because he was polite and didn't leave his underwear lying about.

Much trauma ensued as Housing took a while to get Nadia out. That is my worst dorm experience.

[ASEI]

Last year, there was a pyromaniac that lived in our dorms. In random hours of the morning, he would set something on fire on one of the floors above us. The fire alarm would start blaring this million decibel noise and we'd all have to pile out of bed and out into the pre-dawn night in whatever we could get into fast enough. The fire trucks would come out and we'd be standing out there for at least half an hour as they put out the fire. Sometimes it was in the snow. It happened at least once a week!!!!! !! ! Apparently he doesn't live here this semseter, or the police finally got him(thank God).

Fortunately it never spread beyond that floor.

[ciderman]

The scorching of the carpet in my room was totally & completely accidental, purely the result of a most unfortunate & unforseeable series of happenstance.:whistle:

[shatdow]

My freshman year, there was a large rain storm that flooded a substation on campus, blowing a tranformer and causing the entire campus to loose power. No big deal, we had our share of outages before. However, that evening some frat boys sneaked into my dorm and pulled the fire alarm. Nobody was pleased to stand out in the rain while the firemen checked the building and gave the all clear. Then came the bad news: setting off the alarm had depleted the battery backup for the alarm system, rendering it inoperational. And, the fire chief would not let anybody back in to the building without a working alarm system. So we were sent back in small groups for five minutes, enough time to gather supplies for the night. The residence director was able to procure some cots in a neighboring dorm's cafeteria, but only could dig up 20 for over 200 residents. Everybody else had to fend for hisself.

Then there was the time when somebody decided to pull the old dog-poo-burning-paper-bag prank on me. They forgot 2 things:
1) I wasn't home when they did this, so there was nobody to put out the fire.
2) My dorm room opened to an indoor hallway, unlike the front doors of most victems of this prank.
So the fire alarm went off, and ten minutes later the firemen found the source of the blaze. They still didn't know who did it, and since it was such a stupid (really, really stupid) prank, the policeman who responded with the fire crew wouldn't let anybody back inside until the perpetrators came forward and were held accountable. It took a couple hours before the two guys finally fessed up. I arrived home to find everybody standing around outside, mad as hell that they were being kept from their studying (this was during finals week).

[Romanus]

I've been out of college for a while now, but two nightmares come to mind, both from my first semester in a dorm:

1.) The walls were thin, which meant that you could hear just about everything in the next room. *Everything*. Especially the neighbor's answering machine, which would beep incessantly once it got a message. Can't tell you how many days and nights I'd listen to that damned beeping for what seemed like hours, wondering when he was going to check his messages.

2.) I got in a fight with my roommate. Not a fistfight, but a fight over property. He at first let me use a lot of his stuff, but he became more restrictive over time, and finally late in the semester he just up and did everything but call me a freeloader, and told me never to touch his stuff again. That's as close as I've ever gotten to really, *really* blowing my top, though I kept my mouth shut. I moved into another room the next semester (by the by, the guy I moved in with became by far my favorite roommate), and didn't talk to him for the rest of the semester, nor for years afterward. In fact, if it hadn't been for 9/11, I doubt we would have spoken again.

Yeah, I hold a mean grudge.

Addendum: There's a third, which is perhaps one of the weirdest adventures I've ever had. During one spring semester, they had to evacuate my entire dorm due to a dangerous mold problem--during finals week. They literally told us to pack as much as we need for a week, label the rest of our stuff, and get out of there, to be shacked up in various hotels around town. My roommate made the mistake of only packing a day's worth of clothes, and they wouldn't let him go back into the dorms until it was decontaminated; man, was he mad. In any event, I didn't get a lot of my stuff back for weeks, maybe months.

[Vermonter]

I loathe the freshmen dorms. UVM somehow attracts "students" that prefer to set fire alarms off in the middle of the night, all year round. When I lived in Wills, not a week would go by without some moron yanking the fire alarm, smoking pot and setting it off, or burning something. There would be little "wars" between Wills and the Chittenden/Buckham, where they would raise hell for the fun of it...irked me more than once. I was unfortunate enough to have my room right next to the stairwell where EVERYONE congregated to drink and be dumb. More than once I had to act like a bear to get them to go elsewhere. That, and my roommate was the most disrespectful little brat I've known. Stuff of mine had been broken while I was away, and he always denied it, despite the fact that he always had his moronic friends over to drink and smoke pot. He even sealed the room with duct-tape! If there was a person I would have duct-taped to a goalpost, it would have been him.

[MrClean]

Ahhh college. The trashcans full of water balanced up against the doors, the Manilla envelopes full of shaving creme slid under the door, knock, then stomp. The stuffing of pennys into the door crack till the lock couldn't be opened.
What, you want more?
My sons experience is worse. His roomate believes firmly that you only need to wash sheets or your hair about once a semester, his switching roomates at the end of this semester.

PS, there is ALWAYS a belcher. What you really don't want is the cowboy that finds it necesary to turn 'Stand By Your Man' on every Thursday and Saturday morning at 3 after the bars have closed.

[Ilya]

I guess I was lucky. I only lived in dorms my first and second undergrad years, and can not recall any truly awful experiences. By the end of my freshman year me and one of my two roommates utterly hated each other, but that is not dorm-specific.

BTW, dorm bathrooms at Vassar were unisex, which oddly enough did not cause any friction. There was one all-female dorm for women who did not want to deal with that.

[mickal555]

Hey what happened to your avatur! :D

[pghnative]

It was in college that I learned to sleep with earplugs.

[Moose]

My only bad experience was with my across-the-hall neighbor. He was (probably still is) an eco-freak. Including having chained himself, naked, to trees in BC.

What made him an irritant as a neighbor was that he'd sing made-up songs (one notorious one glorified North Korea, to the tune of Ode to Joy) at the top of his voice at all hours. He'd run around the halls half-naked (and I'm not talking "shirt off", either.)

For a solid month, he filled his room with dead leaves. I don't have any serious allergies, but apparently I'm allergic to decaying leaves. My sinuses have never burned that much in my life. He only got rid of them when housing was documenting their justification to toss him out for "cause".

On a more inevitable note, our fire alarms would go off in the middle of the night about once a week. Not 'cause they were pulled, but because there were silverfish (insects) in the wiring.

[Celestial Mechanic]

Burn down his dorm/room.
:naughty: Illegal in most jurisdictions.

[ciderman]

However, seeding his floor/carpet with cress & watering it may be acceptable (if there's enough time left).