Roommate Reflections: Cleaning for a Hat

My senior year, the female R.A.s stole a hat from one of the male R.A.s and used it as an incentive for Room Checks.

Whoever had the cleanest room got to keep the hat for the next week.

It wasn't that The Roommates had any desire to have a smelly old boy-hat, but having the hat was a status symbol, and The Roommates were all about status.

So it was our goal every week to get the hat.

That's a lot easier said than done when you cram eight college girls into a four-person apartment. Especially since many of us are not known for our obsessive-compulsive cleaning habits.

So, we had to come up with a way to both earn the hat and not do any actual work.

And, as we usually did, we succeeded.

Room Check night approached, and Apartment 14 was littered with clothes, dirty dishes, textbooks, homework assignments, lotions and cosmetics, and various other bits of debris typical of the college lifestyle.

I didn't actually live in Apartment 14, but I lived there more often than I did in my own apartment, and since Apartment 14 was The Roommate apartment, I was still invested in the group effort to win the prize.

So, in the dwindling hours approaching curfew, when the R.A.s would make their rounds with write-up slips in hand for those who didn't clean and a hat for the room that cleaned the most, The Roommates scurried about, thrusting junk into every crevice in an effort to make the apartment appear tidy.

We didn't have time to wash all the dishes, but we knew a sink full of dirty dishes meant a write-up, so we stuffed all the dirty dishes in the oven. Food and anything else in the kitchen was stuffed into cupboards and the refrigerator, to be found months later just when its owner had given up hope of ever having it again.

Virtually everything else in the apartment was shoved into closets, until the closets, cartoon-like, threatened to burst open, spewing their contents over the newly-vacuumed floor.

Then, in one last burst of super-human creativity, we strung Christmas lights up around the living room for "added decoration." It may have been because there was not even an inch of space left in a closet in which to stuff them, or it may have been a genuine attempt to make it look more pleasant, but whatever the cause, the effect was nice.

The R.A.s came in, and, seeing the glittering countertops, the vacuumed floors, and no sign of excess junk anywhere, were so overwhelmed they passed us with flying colors.

One of us pointed out the stunning twinkle of the decorative lights draped around the room, and that clinched it. Once again, The Roommates were in posession of The Hat.