One Week....

One Week.

Seven Days.

168 Hours.

A Metric Buttload of seconds....

That's the amount of time that the guys on the eighth floor have gone WITHOUT flooding some section of their floor.

Last week they made it seven days and three hours....we are pushing it.

Let us Start at the Beginning...that's always a good place to start.

OK, so on Tuesday January 11, 2005 at 6:30 PM interesting things began to happen....and all because someone downstairs moved a chair.....

I was sitting on my roommate's (Kim) bed putting my new DVD's into my binder. There is stuff quite literally everywhere since we just took the boxes apart to get them out of the way and then started re-organizing. Kim is looking through some of the carnage at a game or at one of the DVD's when she decides to go take a shower and we'll watch a movie when she gets finished. I'm still happily putting my things away when all of a sudden I hear a loud 'POP' and this horrible smell.....then the fire alarms start to go off. We don't have conventional fire alarms here....we have battleship sirens (to match the big ugly metal doors of course) you know, the kind that go "whoop! whoop! PLEASE EXIT THE BUILDING. AN EMERGENCY HAS BEEN REPORTED. DO NOT USE THE ELEVATORS. PLEASE EXIT THE BUILDING IMMEDIATELY." So I grab my coat and then think "HA! Kim is in the shower....I should go see if she needs a coat or anything..." So she has me get her bathrobe and we head downstairs. Just as we hit the stairs, three guys come off the tenth floor (yes, we live on nine) and she's wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around her and trying to haul a bathrobe over her shoulder....funny to say the least....we can smell like...an electrical smell and she claims she saw smoke, but I was too busy laughing at her trying to get dressed. Anyway, we all go outside and wait for Richmond Fire Department to show up. Now, people are milling randomly about the lawn staring at the building wondering what's up, when we see a bunch of guys from eight standing off to one side. Three of them are soaked. I mean, yeah....they could have been in the shower.....but I don't think so. They tell the rest of us that eight is flooding. As in water is RUSHING down their hall way and it's black and smells awful. So RFD goes in and pokes around. EKU utility people show up and scratch their heads and an RHC (Residence Hall Coordinator) comes out and tells us all to go to Burnam or Powell to sit and wait for updates, that they'll be coming every fifteen minutes and that we'll be let in as soon as possible. So we go to Sullivan Hall to get Kim some clothes from a friend, cuz Kim isn't thrilled with walking all over campus in a towel and bathrobe. Then we stop at Burnam but there are like, six people there and we don't know any of them. FIguring everyone else (meaning the cool people) is at Powell, we go there. But there are only about ten people there, and we still don't know many of them and those we know we didn't want to talk to anyway. So we go back to Clay and watch as EVERY WET/DRY VAC ON CAMPUS IS HAULED OUT AND MARCHED INTO OUR BUILDING....and I'm not kidding....I think we counted like twelve go in when we got there. I mean, it's like the poor kids version of the Main Street Parade from Disney Land. So we're hanging out with the cool people now and trying to figure out what's going on. Now, our friend Ryan lives on eight and his story in itself is kind of funny.... [I'm not spelling everything as he said it. Just assume everything has THE STRONGEST KENTUCKY ACCENT YOU'VE EVER HEARD.]

"now, mah room mate and I are sittin' on the floor of our room cuz he's tryin' to unpack the new computer he just got de-livered today when all of a sudden the alarms start goin' off and shit [pronounced w/ two syllables]. So we go to leave [also a two syllable word] and there is water, I mean WATER rushin down our hallway, blacker than hell and smellin' just awful. Now, you know how hot it is up thar and we was just settin' around in our shorts. All I could think when I stepped out inter the hall [you guessed it...two syllables again] was "well, shit....this cain't be good 'er nothin'." and now ah'm cold. Why cain't they jus....[insert unintelligable mumbling here] so's we can assess daymages 'er somethin'. I didn't have no time to put mah britches on 'er nothin'. I don't know about any of y'all, but I need a bayer (in the real world, 'bayer' is pronounced 'beer')"

Now, rumors are starting to flow and I'm probably not helping matters because I'm telling people what I know because I heard a 'pop' and the water starting to flow. Someone reports that eight is flooded, seven is catching hell and six is just starting to feel the effects. Someone else says it'll be another hour before we can get back in. It's already been an hour since this thing started... Twenty minutes later the damage is down to five, only on the one section of the building (Clay is kind of L shaped so just the short part of the L was getting wet) and it'll be another hour to forty five minutes 'til we can get back in. Ali and I go for a long walk...we watch the guys get two footballs and basketball stuck in a tree and wonder how their going to get them out...we wander off...it's better not to ask questions. We tell someone who'd been in class what had happened. This was not recomended however because he is the eighth floor's RA and he went APESHIT when he found out it was his guys that did it. Then we went back to watch the guys get the balls out of the tree. When we went back for an update they told us it would be an hour to forty five minutes til we could get back in.....this was an hour after the LAST time we checked in. We're finally able to piece a story together while we're waiting and it's amazing....

THe guy in room 812 (Just an FYI, I live in 912) was moving some furniture AND HIT THE SPRINKLER SYSTEM, KNOCKING IT SO FLIPPIN' HARD THAT IT WENT FLYING OFF, SPEWING WATER EVERYWHERE, TURNING EIGHT INTO A FLOOD ZONE. You're probably thinking bunkbed right? Oh no my friends...he was moving a desk chair....a rickety, nasty, creaky, busted ancient desk chair. He lifted it OVER HIS HEAD, don't ask why...I didn't, and hit the sprinkler.

I eventually did find out why....this kid is in the color guard...apparently he was moving the desk chair so he had more room to spin THE RIFLE! THE PLASTIC COLOR GUARD RIFLE THAT THEY NEVER CATCH ANYWAY! They had to put him into protective custody because the eighth floor guys were going to beat the shit out of him.

So now we're waiting around and they FINALLY let us back into Clay. THe parade of wet dry vacs goes by....nothing like Disney's parade....but still pretty interesting. THere's water all the way down the stair well, eight was flooded, but the computer was OK, nine and ten stood around and laughed at the other poor idiots. Though there was some slight water damage on seven (water flowing through closet floors and such) it was nothing spectacular.

Total time of circus? THREE HOURS

Now what did we learn from this?

1.) Bring ID and cell phone w/ you when you leave the building
2.) Bring Car keys when you leave...you may want to go somewhere
3.) Rumors suck
4.) Breaking sprinklers in a dorm building is a good way to get free laundry the next day :-D
5.) Thou shalt not lift things over one's head to move them from one side of the room to the other.
6.) Don't take showers if the guys downstairs are going to be dipshits
7.) They really do have indoor running water in Kentucky
8.) It pays to live on the ninth or tenth floor

....Ah, the life of a college student.....

Seven days and three hours later, I'm sitting in my bed watching 'The Amazing Race' I'm ready for bed...I want my show to end so I can sleep. But the idiots on the ninth floor have different ideas.

The Alarm goes off. So I climb out of bed...I put my slippers on...I'm thinking this is just a drill, I mean, we already had our real emergency last week. So I grab my cloak (yes, I own a full length gray wool cloak) and my keys and my cell phone and I leave my room. What do we find out when we get outside? Eight is flooding.

This has to be a joke...this can't be real.....I mean can you say de ja vu? We've already done this before. They tell us to go to Burnam, Case or powell....what the hell is going on?

I try to find a TV somewhere on campus that is showing the Amazing Race, but no one is..they're all watching that ghetto show with the people that can't sing...what's it called....America's Tone Deaf?

So I'm mopey...I want ice cream.....but the Convenience store doesn't have any of the right flavor....I'm double mopey.

I crash on the couch of the student union for a while. I find someone who has motrin and I take some...between my head ache and my back ache, I needed it. I go to one of the dorms to get an update. Apparently the guys on eight were throwing a tennis ball in their hall way and they hit the sprinkler head....it sheared off....Spewing water down the LONG HALL OF CLAY. That's right...the entire eighth floor has had the joy and honor of being flooded.

So THREE HOURS LATER I've proved to people that it is possible to sleep in a noisy lobby, and that I'm not happy...I don't want to do this anymore...several people from the building are discussing lynching the boys from eight. There was water damage all the way down to our lobby....it was not good to live low in the building....

And so, seven days later we hold our breath....they still have two hours....they can still fuck this up.....


-----Fortunately they succeeded in not setting the alarms off-----