Roommate Reflections

Dorm Wars

My first year of college, when I lived in the dorm, there was a pretty severe rivalry going on between the girls' dorm and the boys' dorm. Pranks flew like feathers in a pillow fight, escalating with each trick.

It started out innocently enough. We (the girls' dorm in general, although not everyone was involved in every prank) did little things, like Elephant Runs.

The Freshman dorm was a smallish, two-story building. Girls lived on the top floor and boys lived on the bottom. We quickly learned that virtually everything we did could be heard below, so when we wanted to annoy the boys we'd stand in our rooms or in the kitchen and drop marbles or pennies on the hard floors, sending pinging echoes through the boys' abode. Or, we'd all start at one end of the building and Elephant Run down the hallway, our thundering footsteps vibrating the building and annoying the boys.

Their retaliations were equally irritating but harmless. Sometimes they'd call the payphone situated in the hallway in the middle of the night, and then hang up before someone answered. That way, they woke us all up, but didn't have to waste a quarter.

We stuck a dead fish in their vents so their whole dorm stunk for weeks, but they didn't know what the smell was or where it was coming from.

In turn, they dressed up in the outfits from the Scream movies, with the scary masks, and climbed up and knocked on our windows late at night, severely freaking some of the girls out.

We upped the stakes a little bit by removing all the license plates from their cars (we didn't realize at the time that it was illegal...) and gift-wrapping them, leaving them in the Student Activity Center (affectionately referred to as The SAC) for the boys to find. One of our prime antagonists got his truck propped up on blocks and the tires removed and hidden around campus.

The boys crossed the line, however, when they invaded our dorm. One Saturday night when we were all sleeping, they broke in. They got one of those giant (and I do mean GIANT) bags of popcorn and dumped it all up and down our hallway and in our common area. They left messages in shaving cream on our walls and floor, the most prominent being "GOTCHA, SUCKERS!" running down the length of our hallway. In our common area, on top of a three-foot-high mountain of popcorn, they left us a pair of giant, nasty, skid-marked tighty-whities.

Then, as if that weren't enough, shut off our electricity so our alarm clocks didn't go off in the morning (VERY frustrating for a few of the girls who had jobs and church commitments), and they got these giant traffic barricades and wedged them in front of both the front and back doors so we couldn't get out. We had to send someone out the window, scaling down the brick latticework, to go remove the barriers.

So there we were, at home on a Sunday morning, seething from our recent violation, and with the knowledge that the boys' dorm was sitting empty...

No WAY were we gonna let this slide!

After pitching in money, a couple girls went to the store, returning with birdseed, syrup, shaving cream, vinegar, and sardines, among other things.

One of our girls was dating one of their boys, and she managed to finagle his key from him, so when we were all prepared, we snuck into the boys' dorm. We put syrup on door handles and toilet seats, then stuck birdseed to the syrup. We littered the floor with birdseed. We wrote shaving cream messages. We put sardines in the washer and dryer so their clothes would smell. We sprayed vinegar on the walls so the dorm would smell funny. And we returned their tighty-whities.

In the exultation of revenge, some of the girls got a little carried away. The next day, we were hauled into the dean's office. The chewing out we received could have made a drill sergeant jealous. Apparently some of the birdseed had found its way into a CD player and ruined it, and the vinegar had stained the couch in their common room.

We were threatened with suspension and even expulsion. All future dorm wars were strictly forbidden.

Finally, after we explained that it was retaliation for what they had done, and that we didn't mean to damage property and would gladly pay to replace it, we were let off with write-ups and community service.

And we managed to do most of our community service hours scouring and doing improvements on our own dorm, so we pretty much managed to cheat our way out of our entire punishment.

And thus a firm foundation for The Roommates was built.