| Suitemate Wars |
| The Warning: The signs and photos you are about to see are real. The story is true (I like to flatter myself and think it's like the Amityville Horror... eh...anyway). The setting: College of William and Death The time: sophomore year I live in a dorm. In a quad. With three roommates. And we share a bathroom with two suitemates. They are sorority girls. Let's change their names for privacy's sake and call them Ditzen and SaraLee. One of them has a hair neurosis -Ditzen, the tall, skinny one who has hair down to her waist, as a matter of fact. This poor girl made a point to let us know that hair strands left in the shower are unacceptable. "OK. We will be careful." Let's consider this a minute, though.. I have three roommates and two suitemates. This makes 6 girls and one shower.....Keep this mind as you read the great suitemate epic. |
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| This picture is self explanatory. Too bad it was found on our bathroom door. |
It began innocently enough, with Ditzen making occasional embarrassed visits to our room early in the fall semester: "I don't mean to sound like a psychobitch, but can you please clean the hair out of the shower?? It really gives me the creeps. I have this thing about hair." "Yep!" It's inevitable, though, that four girls all with long hair are going to leave a strand or two in the bathroom. MEANWHILE, my roommates were becoming slightly frustrated over the suitemates' apparent inability to figure out how to unlock our door to the bathroom. Many times did we travel to their room, or call them, or IM them requesting that they unlock the door. "All that alcohol," I rationalized. I was content to condescendingly laugh at the suitemates - They were not as forgiving towards us! The visits became more angry, until finally one day the first signs appeared. "FIRST?" you say? Yeah... The original signs were posted on our door. One of them was a diagram of the shower, with shower curtain labelled, and squiggly lines labelled with arrow "hair." This sign warned us to remove hair. The other sign stayed on the wall for so long that it was still there when I had the idea to save it for posterity's sake. |
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| The first real battle came before fall break, when I made a tactical blunder. You see, I had a surefire system of keeping my hair out of the shower: wash hair, deposit excess hair on shower wall, take hair out when done, deposit hair in trash can. End Result: no hair on shower wall or in drain. But Problem: Sometimes I forget steps 3 and 4. New End Result: massive amount of hair on shower wall. So that stressful week before fall break was the first time I forgot. And I mean forgot - was merrily going through my daily routine and returned to the room, left open the door for a breeze, said hello to SaraLee as she walked by to her room. LITTLE DID I SUSPECT... - About five minutes later I hear a knock on the bathroom door, "yes?" I look over and there in the doorway stand BOTH the suitemates, tall, skinny Ditzen and short,stumpy SaraLee - like the stereotypical sidekick and hero. So I go to the bathroom to inspect. One roommate hid in bed and pretended to be asleep, the other lingered behind in our room.. I was left alone with the two angry stooges. Ditzen rips the shower curtain aside to reveal massive clumps of hair! (psycho shower music) "That's a fuckin' lot of hair!!!" "Heh.... so it is... that's mine...yeah.." "What do you do -- rub your head on the wall?!!" |
| So I explained my hair removal process, and after some moments of frownful contemplation they accepted this. I apologized again and they felt appeased and left. That was the first close call, but it didn't do much for the long run. "Peace in our time" indeed! During the fall break, I visited my family in MD and my uncle suggested we go to a barber shop and get a good sized bag of hair clippings to spread around the tub. The Roommies and I also toyed with the idea of buying a good Halloween wig and putting that in there. My favorite idea was to write something on the wall with my excess hair -somehow "red rum" came up in every conversation that involved this idea. Fortunately (or not, by some accounts), we did not put any of these plans into action.... |