Stories from the Dorms

I received a couple of requests to post my interesting stories from my job as night clerk at a residence hall on the University of Illinois Campus. Well, here you go. These are not in any particular order. I will let you guess which one is my favorite.

1.My first week here: We tell all of the residents here (18 and 19-year-old kids) that, if they burn food and the smoke alarm goes off in their room, they should open a window and waft it out that way. NEVER open the door to the inside hallway for this reason, because if the smoke alarm goes off in the hallway, the entire building has to be evacuated and the fire department has to come. Well, at about 2:30 a.m., a couple of guys just had to have hamburgers, really well done. That's not the good part of the story. About 30 minutes later, when all 250 some odd kids are making their way back inside, one of the girls vomits all over the patio, and the crowd scatters. We went to clean it up once everyone was inside and I noticed there wasn't just wine cooler; for some reason there was a rubber band mixed in with it.

2.On occasion, I have to play the hard-A and break up a drinking party. It's funny because they all see me as some sort of authority figure, when I can't actually do anything. It's fun though, to go banging on the door, and listen to everyone frantically tell each other to shut up. "Do you live here?" "Yes, sir." "Is this your booze?" "Yes, sir." "Dump it down the drain, Now" (In a super serious, intimidating tone). "Ok, I'm sorry, sir." "Yeah, you better be. Don't make me come back up here." Haha.

3.There is one resident, Elaine, that stops to talk to me once in a while. Sometimes she is coming back from a party, a bit out of it. Just before Christmas she had gone to a party at a frat house. I guess they had decorated for the holidays, including fake, spray-on snow on the windows. And this fake snow was scented. Elaine tells me that she had such a fun time, and she wrote her name on the window in the fake snow. "Now my finger smells so good." At this point she is not longer talking to me, but she is speaking softly to herself, "It smells so good" (while sniffing her finger), "it smells like Christmas...it's so good." After a solid twenty seconds of sniffing her own finger and talking to herself she staggered back into the realization that I was staring at her with a big grin on my face. She quickly wished me a good night, without making eye contact, and rushed off to the elevator. Merry Christmas indeed.