The Life Aquatic

My junior year in college, I moved from a shared room into what used to be the graduate residence hall. In this dorm, every set of two rooms had a shared door that locked on both sides (like a hotel) and a shared phone box. Back in those days dorms either had one phone at the end of the hall, or, if you were in a “recently” remodeled building, this phone box, which meant that you had the luxury of being able to lie on your bed and talk–with only one person listening in–instead of having to sit on the floor in the hallway where everyone could hear you. Anyway, the girl who lived on the other side of the phone box was dating a guy who got off of work around two o’clock in the morning. She would set a clock radio to go off loudly around one in the morning so she wouldn’t fall asleep and miss going to meet him.

One night, the radio began to blare and didn’t stop and I realized that she’d left early and forgotten to turn off the radio. I suffered through for a while and then just had to do something about it. I figured that the only way to shut off the radio without leaving her room unlocked was to get into her room through the phone box, turn her radio off, and come back the way I got in. I crawled up on the desk, lifted the phone off its post, wriggled through the phone box, killed the radio, wriggled back into my room, and went to bed.  When I told her about it the next day, she apologized. When the radio went off again a few nights later I did the wriggle thing again, but by the third night I decided that if she could leave me with a blaring radio I could leave her with an unlocked room. That solved that problem.

Then, there was the very odd girl directly across the hall.  She was afraid of heights, so she had bought a loft bed as part of a de-sensitization plan. It didn’t really work, so she took something to help her sleep. And, she was a lover of mudpuppies (an aquatic salamander), who need a warm and moist environment. To keep the mudpuppies happy she ran the heat full-blast and put pans of water on the radiator, so her room smelled like the tide pool at the zoo. One night, one of her mudpuppies escaped its tank and made its way under the shared door into her suite mate’s room. When the suite mate got up to go to the bathroom she stepped on the mudpuppy. She screamed loud and long, which woke the rest of us up quickly and the mudpuppy-lover not so quickly. Sadly, the mudpuppy died, and the acrophobe went into mourning. I bet the suite-mate is still undergoing therapy. Want to see a mudpuppy? Go to Wikipedia and check it out, but don’t ever step on one with bare feet!