Predictability and a Fire Extinguisher

I find it incredibly twisted that my blog is able to tell the future. I write about something like the baseball players being on vacation, and these come home that night. I write about the baseball players causing fire alarms to go off in Havey... and last night they did it again. Are my psychic skills that sharp or is it the subject that is so easy to predict? Well regardless, I have a story to tell you. Maybe it will make you as angry as I was when it happened...

probably not.

So my evening last night was pretty laid back. Tuesday night, no homework, midnight breakfast, only one class tomorrow and it didn't start until 10am. Time to have some fun. And I spent a good portion of my evening playing air hockey in Sullivan.

I decided to head to bed at 3:15am, which would give me plenty of rest to take on the three hour class I had in the morning. I put on my plaid sleep-shorts and crawled into bed. But I couldn't fall alseep. There were a few guys in the hallway, definitely drunk/high (I am assuming the drunk part, but the hall certainly smelled of the "reefer" prior to my going to bed), and they were carrying on like it was a tinker tape parade.

"Hey, do you like mortal kombat!?" one yelled.
"Try to get past me!" another screamed.
There is some shuffling, an obvious playful scuffle.
A metal noise.
A short silence.
...The fire alarm goes off.

This would mark the second time the alarm had gone off in three days. So of course, I didn't feel like taking this one seriously. I laid in bed a moment, waiting for it to stop... and sure enough it did after about 40 seconds. I got down and checked outside, didn't seem like anyone was standing out there. For a moment I thought about going out to bed, but just to make sure that the fire alarm was behind me, I checked in the hallway.

I couldn't see anything! The entire hall was filled with a white fog (not to be confused with smoke, which is gray and filled with ninjas, unless it is green smoke then it's filled with the Green Goblin) that scratched my throat when I breathed. This wasn't good. After cursing the darkness, I put on my robe (which by pure coincidence matched my sleep shorts) and my slippers and shuffled down to first floor. I couldn't see more than four feet in front of me, and at the end of the hallway was a maintinence man saying something into a walky talky about how it wasn't smoke.

When I got downstairs, Dr. Robyn and one of the campus police (I don't know his name, and to keep him out of this... I will just say he's the mean one) were addressing all of the angry residents. Dr. Robyn reported that someone set off a fire extinguisher, which filled the hallway with this toxic fog (which is very ironic, considering that an extinguisher saves your life, but could hurt you as well... kind of like jumping from a doomed train onto another parallel train which is headed for a tunnel). The officer was furious, threatening to take the extinguisher downtown and get it dusted for finger prints. I was all for this. Outside, of the dorm, firetrucks pulled up. and Dr. Robyn mentioned something about how the firemen could be missing a real emergency somewhere, but instead they were here. I wonder if she read my last post?

It's an interesting site when something like this happens. Some people are really really angry (like myself), others are still asleep, some are scared out of their minds for one reason or another (ie they have a girl in their room, they are high, they are drunk, they were in the middle of an ebay auction, or they CAUSED the alarm to go off).

If I were a taller, heavier man with a voice that didn't change pitches when I yelled I would have flipped out on everyone. I think I am a very intelligent speaker when it comes to common sense in the dorm. This blog is a perfect example.

That's when Mick announced that people could go back on first and third floors... however no one was allowed on 2nd floor. And Dr. Robyn continued saying that we might not even get to sleep there for the night. So anyone who wanted, could go sleep in Sullivan or on first or third floor. But later she recanted, saying that we had two options: go clean the floor ourselves or wait until 7:30 for maintence to come and clean it. Well, since cleaning just involved running a vacuum, most of the athletes volunteered to go clean it (some of which were CERTAINLY involved with creating the mess). I refused. I was not about to help them clean up this debocle that they created. (Just like the time they filled the floor with popcorn and about a third of it slid under our door... can you see why I say the things I say?)

So I waited it out. They cleaned the floor in record time, and it was safe to go up at around 4:30ish. But before we went to bed, Dr. R told us that the entire building was going to get a hefty fine unless someone turned in the culprets. There were so many pissed off people there, that I don't doubt that the perpetrator will be caught within the week (unless he crawls in a snake hole or flees to the Pakistani border).

And so ends another crazy evening in Havey. This was by far the craziest evening out of the year aside from that crazy Tuesday in December. I will never understand why people are the way they are, and why people have to do stupid things. But I guess if some guys didn't do stupid stuff, I wouldn't have any stories to tell from college. At least, I wouldn't have stories that started with "So there were these schmucks that lived in my dorm..."

Posted by MikeRubino at March 10, 2004 3:26 PM