Remember freshman shenanigans? Read the tales from the RAs who had to deal with them. There are some gems. College was amazing.
Helperbobby asked, College RA's or Police: Whats the most memorable event you've had with college freshman?
Submissions have been edited for clarity, context, and profanity.
We're starting off on a dark note.
Got a duty call from a worried mom one Saturday afternoon. She hadn't heard from her 18-year old daughter in a few days and wanted someone to check on her. Sure, I said. I go and knock on her door. She's there, just studying. She promises to call her mom.
Next day the student died. She got very sick, called a friend, went to the hospital, and was dead in a matter of hours. I wasn't the last person to see her alive, but I might have been the last to see her healthy. Years later, I can't shake the feeling that her mom had some sort of premonition.
What could possibly happen to a mattress in a frat house?
I was once notified by one of my residents that her mattress had been "misplaced" and she wanted to know if she would be charged for it or if she was good. I told her she would most certainly be charged for it and then, mysteriously, the mattress reappeared the week before summer closing. I heard through the paper-thin door of her room later that it had been at a frat house for awhile and I dread the thought of what happened to it.
This is how the real learning happens.
I used to catch people playing possum all the time. Basically a bunch of students would climb a tree and drink until they started falling out. Last person in the tree wins.
Found a couple idiots having "lightsaber fights" once. They'd unscrewed the fluorescent tubes and we're having swordfights with them.
One time a whole floor got scabies and were running back and forth from the laundry room washing every single item of clothing and linen they had.
One resident was hiding a homeless person in the TV room. Residents were welcome to have friends on site and they were also welcome to stay in the TV room and the rec center after lockup, they just had to pull the door closed after themselves when they left. This guy was staying in the TV room with his homeless friend until the RAs finished their rounds, locking him in the TV room, going back and sleeping in his own room and then waking up early to go back to the TV room before the RAs came around in the morning unlocking everything again.
I woke up around midnight one night because people were firing Roman candles at one of the buildings. We were having problems with some local kids who kept playing pranks on the residents and naturally I assumed it was them. So I called campus security to deal with it and they ended up rounding up my own residents. After I gave them all write-ups one of them asked me why I didn't tell them beforehand that they weren't allowed to set fireworks off on campus.
Not my hall but still pretty memorable: the RAs from one of the other residences on campus came to us with one of their problems. They kept finding human faeces outside one of their buildings and assumed it was one of our residents playing pranks on them (completely reasonable, we had a weird group that year). I told him that I would keep an ear out. When it kept happening one of their RAs had a stake out and saw the faeces being dropped out of one of the windows. Turns out this resident was setting toilet paper down on his bedroom floor, sh*tting on it and dropping it out the window because he didn't want to use the halls bathrooms.
On the final night in the halls I found a room of people each pouring a beer directly into the carpet for their friends who had left uni before the semester finished.
Best two years of my life.
Your terrible freshman roommate wasn't as bad as this.
My RA friend had a similar strange experience. So the dorm was a big tower. It had sixteen rooms per floor, with four on each side. There was a community bathroom for each floor next to the stairwell and the elevator in the center of the tower. Anyway, despite the simple layout, one of the new students couldn't find the bathroom. His solution? Poop in his own bed and cover it with sheets, and sleep elsewhere. He was discovered about five days after the poop because the smell became unbearable for not only his roommate, but the entire floor. Sometimes I wonder where he is now.
Legendary.
One of my freshman-year floor mates got kicked out of the dorms before Halloween, so we shotgunned beers and poured some out for him and paraded him out of the dorm. Then we had a candle light vigil for him in the hallway and put up what was essentially a shrine to him hahahaha. Anyone who came to our floor asked us if he died.
They don't cover this in orientation.
Very first night on call by myself. Watching the news in my dorm room. See my resident's mugshot. The housing staff were unclear on the procedure of what to do when a resident is arrested for murder.
I had a fish for like week; knocked the bowl over one day and that was the end of it.
RA a looooong time ago. Group of freshman in a 4 man suite got permission for a pet somehow from the housing office.
They didn't specify it was a f*cking PIG. The smell was unbelievable.
That lasted a couple of weeks until the dean of students finally gave me and the housing office the power to threaten expulsion.
Hoarders: Dorms.
I was neither of those but on my floor (My sophmore year) we had freshmen move in.
This one guy put blankets all over his floor. No big deal I see them do this a lot, the carpet is really ugly and it actually help a lot with cleaning. You roll up the blanket and shake it off outside and wash it. Anyway what this kid did was ridiculous. He had no roommate but he had people over all the time. And whenever he would have people over they made a mess. Instead of cleaning the blankets he just stacked more blankets on top of the old dirty ones. This god so bad and he was so lazy that if he spilled something, or had trash like pizza boxes he didn't want to take out, he put another blanket over everything. This obviously started to smell HORRIBLE so he took air spray and sprayed the crap out of his floor/blanket mattress/room sized couch. So since there was stuff in between the layers of blankets the room was all lumpy and wavy and it started to rise slowly over the year as he piled more blankets.
Christmas Break came. I told the RA about this and he went in to check. The blankets from only one semester had already brought the "floor" to about 6 inches off the ground. You had to STEP UP to get into his room. Something had to be done and he was told to get rid of it or there would be a consequence. I left the building and moved to a closer dorm to the music building for the next semester so I forgot about it.
Come May. I went over to that dorm to pick up a friend to take him back home after graduation. Peeps be moving out of the dorms. I went up to the 2nd floor and there is the grounds team. Using pipe saws and box cutters to cut the dudes now 1foot thick "floor" of blankets into squares to get it out of his room. It was grown through with mould, (of all colors), trash, smelly stuff, and lots of liquid. It was amazing.
This is peak lazy.
Murderous_Clown had some followup questions: What the f*ck. Where did he even get all those blankets?
Right?
Swaglfar responded: We had a Walmart that sold these multicolored blankets for like 5 - 10 dollars a piece. Pretty large and a decent material.
Crazy or crafty?
Oh god. You just reminded of a resident my ex had to deal with (I was an RA dating an RA lmao) and she did NOT want a roommate. She chose to live in a dorm that required roommates, you could pay more to live alone at a different dorm but I guess she just didn't want to do that.
So what does she do? She pees in her bed until her roommate gets so fed up they move to another room. And when someone comes to check the room? She switches the mattresses so hers is clean and it looks like whoever left, left the pee soaked mattress. It was a nightmare for the RAs of that building to deal with because our Residence Life higher ups were like "we don't care, you have to check the room, it's a safety requirement" but you literally couldn't walk in there without your eyes watering and gagging within seconds.
People are f*cking crazy.
