From the dungeon of residence life

The night you spend 45 minutes in your office with a resident about to have a roommate moved into the room she’s had to herself all semester…

But you don’t understand - I have an empire. You can’t take that away from me. I have both beds right now, and it is not fair to make me take them apart. She’s not going to appreciate my habits and the noise I am accustomed to making, and I’m not changing my habits. There is no reason for me to have to get used to a roommate if she can live with someone else who’s used to having a roommate. And! If you move this girl in, my dad is gonna call your boss.

…The day it becomes acceptable for our female residents to throw themselves at society wearing only heels and a lace napkin. Their wardrobe choices are literally unbelievable to me.

Sitting in the RA office tonight, two residents clad in satin leotards and fishnets came in demanding to know where their friend lived. This friend had unprotected sex and desperately needed a Plan B pill but she didn’t have any money.

So….you ARE thinking about this and evaluating your life choices as you go along, right? Fishnets, friend choices and all?

They wouldn’t really, well, leave. They were determined to find their friend, after we ourselves banged on the resident’s door with no response. So sorry, but that is our legal limit. No, there is no point at which we would feel sorry enough to key into the room. Good question, though.

This is already too awkward and I already have too much information about this resident you’re describing. It’s gonna be awesome next time I run into any of these people.

Discovered that a resident is being bullied by her roommate. The resident that is an only child and whom I assured would get along great with her roommate. My heart gets cracked in half when my girls are pushed around and told who they can and cannot become. I can be flippant about this job and write a million sarcastic tumblr posts about it….but the reason I pursued this position in the first place is because of my heart for freshmen girls. Back off, bullies, and leave my girl alone.

About the most annoying thing I would actually do to you would be to turn off your student id card….I have the software on my computer, and all I do is assign a temporary id to you with no expiration date. Boom. Deactivated. And all I need is an id number. But let’s be real, I’ve never done that to anybody and probably never will. 

Don’t tempt me.

Sitting at the front desk, the phone rings and a woman announces that she is calling from the drama department…. Little Aubrey has missed her casting call…or rehearsal…or something. She requests that we check to see if Little Aubrey is alright. Ooo, we don’t really do that. Can you even conceive of the number of residents we have that skip class almost religiously? What if we checked every time they missed an appointment? 

So then the police call. When drama teachers call police and police call me…I become slightly more willing to close the office and go knock on doors. Which I did. I awakened sleeping Aubrey and explained several times that several people were looking for her. She squinted at me through bloodshot eyes and told me she hadn’t missed any event or appointment…well, officers are on their way to remind you, then…

Preposterous. What drama class sends uniformed officers to drag people out of bed that don’t show up for rehearsal? Even the football players just get bored college students paid minimum wage to wander from class to class making sure they’re there…

That one awkward time when the front desk started receiving complaints about PDA in the first floor lounge…

Yes, as a Resident Adviser, I daily ask for opportunities to address two 18 year olds lying down together on a public couch entwining their lips and tongues…

The reality of working the front desk is that you can check out temporary room keys to your heart’s content, but the second you start trying to check keys back in, you’re going to have to start alphabetizing paperwork. Which is going to require signing the alphabet song under your breath. So you can either wait till no one else is in the office….or shoo the resident away and tell them they aren’t allowed to turn it back in until the next day.

Housing regulations.

Freshman are notoriously and not surprisingly nosy about all the happenings in the dorms which they have no right to know about, especially events that involve ambulances and drug dogs. You never outgrow this when you become a Resident Adviser….you just suddenly have a title to wave at people when you want to be privy to classified information.

Sometimes the integrity of Resident Advisers is overestimated. Leave a questionable object in our office with a sticky note saying “Don’t touch this, it may be police evidence,” and you demonstrate two things.

One, that I have limited self restraint and much larger capacity for curiosity, and two, the nebulous status of much of what the police considers to be “evidence.”

Hooray for the authority figures in the lives of our residents.

Almost as a rule, Resident Advisers are better acquainted with local law enforcement than the average bear…sometimes by choice, sometimes not. Unexpected levels of bonding often occur at all hours of the day and night when combating the forces of delinquency. The nearest Resident Adviser has a likelihood of being on a first-name basis with the nearest police officer on par with the habitual trespassers and resident vagabonds. 

The most unique aspect of these unlikely friendships is the occasions in which police officers suddenly become gruffer than usual and you have to obey them as would a plebeian freshman.  There’s always that point when you have to just answer their questions and not get too chummy. The dicey part comes when it gets difficult to decipher if this is friend zone or plebeian freshman zone.

The officer’s grin and flippant expletive is usually a pretty decisive signal. 

That one time you changed your hair a little bit and your residents inexplicably walked past you on the sidewalk without even recognizing you. 

Maybe I don’t spend as much time with them as I thought…

The worst phrase an RA could hear: “We need to talk.” This is worse than a DTR with your boyfriend, this is worse than the time your dad found out the mysterious dent in the left fender wasn’t so mysterious after all. This means life turmoil and existential distress with a side of potential bullying, sexual assault and/or dropping out of school. 

Then there’s the time your resident utters the dreaded phrase, looking up at you with unblinking eyes, and all they’ve done is locked themselves out of their room.

Temporary key from the front desk ftw. Crisis avoided