| Straight
from the holler.
by "Buck" April 10, 2007 Most of you folks who visit this place probably did some time in a college. Sorry, Jeff Kay—I know you’re an uneducated, unemployed malcontent. [I'm buckled over in laughter. -JK] Anyway, if you spent even one semester on campus before drinking yourself into a life of stupidity, you no doubt have a bevy of stories about the Resident Assistant or the R-A as they were called at the University of Tennessee. I would assume every college dorm has these folks. They are generally upper classmen, who choose to live in the dorms and serve as a “mentor” for freshmen. I must admit I had a couple of R-A’s who were actually cool people, but the large majority of the ones I dealt with fell into two separate categories, they were either assholes on a power trip or they were complete dorks who took their job WAY too seriously. I lived in Hess Hall my first semester at the University of Tennessee, this place at the time was referred to as “The Zoo”. I assume it still is, because that was a pretty apt description. My R-A had been the R-A of that floor for three years. He was quite proud of his accomplishments. He actually had a wall adorned with group shots of his previous “boys.” Our first week at school we had a “floor meeting” in which this dumbass held court. I ignored most of his diatribe, but noted his attitude of planning to put up with NO FUNNY BUSINESS. I looked around the room and realized, nothing that would happen in the next three months would be funny to HIM, but for the rest of us hilarity was about to ensue. Things started innocently enough. Somebody slipped three pennies into the crack between his door and door facing. This was typically known as “pennying” the door shut. The coins would be so tightly jammed into the crevice that one could not turn the door knob or the dead bolt. He was stuck there all night, pounding and hollering for somebody to let him out. He finally got a maintenance guy to come upstairs and remove the pennies the next morning. He launched an “investigation” and claimed he would have the door fingerprinted for evidence. How funny is that? So after his big meeting, we all went by and fondled his doorknob. Oh he was pissed. During the fall on campus there were oak trees everywhere and campus workers would spend hours and hours blowing leaves into a pile and then sacking them up in trash bags. There would often be 200 to 300 bags of leaves sitting outside the dorms waiting to be picked up by the garbage guys. Their mistake was leaving them there on a weekend. At least 100 of those bags were carted upstairs in the dead of the night and emptied in this guy’s room while he was home for the weekend. The place was literally level-full of leaves two-thirds of the way up the ceiling. The only thing visible was half-of his mirror on the wall, a couple of posters sticking up from the leaves, and the top bunk of a loft bed. I only wish I could have been there when he got home Sunday night. I’m told it was a tirade about which songs were written. One night he went crazy on us, and we had nothing to do with the incident. We lived on the third floor. Our windows were level with the tops of several trees outside. That night somebody on one of the upper floors threw some kind of fireworks out the window. They landed in the top of a tree even with his window. The fireworks went off and he was sure he was being shot at. He was screaming like a school girl, but things only got better. The smoke from the fireworks was considerable—and all of it was sucked into his open window. He came running out, hollering and screaming like the Russians were in Alcoa. Smoke was boiling out of his room. It was also wafting into several others, including mine. I simply shut the window. However, this freak is running up and down the halls, still assuming the dorm was under mortar attack or whatever. Amid all of this, the tops of the trees caught fire and were blazing up right outside the windows all the way down the hall. Our R-A was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He was running around in his underwear, screaming his head off, making irrational statements like, “Can a penis grow out of a chair leg?” Finally somebody pulled the fire alarm, the dorm cleared, and he was out in the street still freaking out. I often think of him when Jeff tells a story about Nostrils because he was truly a pussy in every sense of the word. The tree burning incident was apparently the last straw. We never saw him again after that night. We also didn’t get a new R-A. Our floor was rocking for the rest of the year. I have so many R-A stories, I might have to compile them into a series for the WVSR. I’m sure many of you have your own sets of R-A stories to share. Buck Out |
