The Don Files: Part III
Part three in a continuing series. I'll need to pick up the pace in order to get all of my stories posted before Sunday. [ Part I | Part II]
The creepy guy: This one comes from a term where I wasn't a don, but I got to hear all sorts of stories from people who were. (Friends in high places, as it were.)
We had a guy, Sven, living at St. Paul's who had never lived there before. He was tall and lanky guy, and always had a blank expression on his face, so you couldn't really tell what was going on in his mind (although after a few short conversations with him, I knew that he was smart academically).
During the supper hours, I would see him in random locations throughout the college - the chapel, the boardroom, MacKirdy Hall, the TV Lounge, and so on. And he would be eating his dinner in these areas. Now, if you know the rules of St. Paul's, one of the rules that is banged into your head on the first day is that trays of food normally don't leave the caf.
"Hey, Sven," I asked him one evening as he was eating dinner, "you know that we're only supposed to eat in the caf, right?" "Are you a don?" he asked me. "Well, not this term, but..." He then turned back to eating his food in front of the TV. I asked one of my don friends, Lindsey, about it later on that night, and she said that the don team was figuring out how to proceed. They eventually decided that since Sven was antisocial and wasn't comfortable in the caf, he would be allowed to eat his food in the chapel foyer, if he so desired, but that was it. (He flagrantly broke that rule, but it wasn't my place to correct him.)
Sven was also very territorial with where he would study or lounge around. One night, he was studying in Bunker Lounge, and when a pair of girls came down the stairs to study there, too, he yelled at them until they left. After hearing a few reports of this, Jason* (Residence Life Coordinator) and Mike (former don) would walk around the college some evenings, checking lounges and common areas to see if Sven was anywhere. After one such walk-around, they rested in the boardroom to talk. "I guess that Sven isn't around tonight," Jason commented. At that moment, Sven pokes his head out from underneath the boardroom table and looks at them, frightening the daylights out of Jason and Mike.
Also, Sven would randomly walk into the single rooms of girls who lived on his floor. Sometimes he would just walk in and set himself down on a bed to engage in conversation, while other times it would be in the middle of the night and he would just stand there, watching the girl sleep. Naturally, this creeped out everyone on the floor to the point where whenever some girls walked into their rooms, they would immediately close and lock the door so that no one else could enter. And if anyone knocked, they would refuse to open the door until they knew for certain that Sven wasn't there.
Near the end of the term, I was talking with Lindsey about how she had found donning that term, and she said that living with Sven had been frustrating - so much so that the don team had spent more time talking about Sven in their don meetings than any other student in recent memory.
A few months later, I was cutting through St. Jerome's to get to St. Paul's, when I ran into Sven. He said that he was now living at St. Jerome's, and then asked if I was still living at SPUC. I said that I was, and I kept on walking past him to SPUC; I didn't want to get involved with a crazy stalker guy like that.
Red-handed blackboard: The term before moving in to St. Paul's for one of my donning assignments, there had been incidents of inappropriate things being written on the blackboards and on certain people's doors. I won't elaborate on what was written, but they were of a cruel, sexual nature. I had been warned by the RLC and Dean to watch out for people writing on the blackboard - if anyone was caught, they would be awarded a red card (resulting in an automatic $100 fine).
So, on the first day of the new term, I had written a nice "Welcome to St. Paul's!" message on the blackboard (which was conveniently located near my room). While I was inside changing my clothes with the door closed, I heard someone lightly writing on the blackboard. Did I ever mention that my keen sense of hearing was one of my greatest assets as a don? So I quickly got changed, listened through the door, and then opened the door and walked out into the hall.
I looked at the blackboard, and then turned to the three guys standing there. "So, which of you wrote "PENIS" on the blackboard?" They all looked at the ground and denied having written it on there. I had talked with Bartholomew* before and knew that he was genuinely good guy and would never do that, but I had been warned about Vince and Aidan. However, I wasn't going to play favourites with them (especially on the first day of the term), so I asked each of them individually, and all of them denied it again.
I told them about the new blackboard rule, and Vince spoke up. "We're just writing a body part on here. It's not our fault that people are offended. It's no different than writing 'leg' or whatever."
"I don't care about what you write," I replied, "but the rule is the same for everyone. If there's someone you want to advertise on the blackboard, then please ask me first and I'll probably allow it; otherwise, don't write on the board." Vince tried pushing the envelope further, but I wouldn't bite. Aidan just looked stoned (and, as I later found out, he was for most of the term).
I didn't award a red card to any of them because I didn't have solid proof that they had done it and because I didn't want to give a card to honest Bartholomew. However, that was one of the worst things that was written on my blackboards that term, so maybe I scared them a little bit. Or, more plausibly, maybe they can't write in full sentences.
Throughout the rest of the term, I had to fix my blackboards on a near-daily basis because people would erase certain words/letters to change the meaning of my announcements, or they would wipe their fingers across the board. Not cool.
Moving out: One term, the don team was required to live at St. Paul's until move-out day so that we could help inspect all of the rooms and check for damage. A handful of rooms were immaculately clean - you could tell that these people had put in the effort to dust, vacuum, and empty the garbage. Most rooms were passably clean - not vacuumed or dusted, and there was a bit of garbage out, but no damage. There were also a few who lost their deposit because of damages to the room - a broken chair, holes in the wall, and the like.
And then there was a small handful of rooms that were just disgusting. Kelvin (who had only turned 19 that year) had left around 30-40 empty bottles of alcohol on top of his closet, plus lots of empty beer bottles. We guessed that he had consumed in the neighbourhood of $800-1000 of alcohol that year. We informed Kelvin that he would lose his $150 room deposit, and he promptly came back to gather his bottles (and return them for a deposit at The Beer Store).
But my favourite room was actually my neighbour's room from that term. There was a point in that term where he had been gone for about two weeks (which was great, since he lived alone and neighboured the bed side of my dorm room, meaning that I could go to bed without any noise). Other nights he would have 3 or 4 guys over late into the night and I would have to tell them to shut up. It seemed like he was rarely around the college, except to treat his bedroom as one of his pads to hang out in with his buds.
On move-out day, we inspected his room. Upon opening the door, the first thing that we saw was a ton of garbage scattered across the room - cigarette packages, Coke cans, papers, beer bottles, facial tissue, and anything else you could think of. Above his desk, he had affixed his keys to the wall using masking tape. (This was instead of the well-advertised policy of returning your keys to a don.) At least the keys were easy to find - I presume he was worried about losing his key deposit.
We walked around to the backside of the room, and we saw that he had removed the four closet doors and had them resting against a wall; this was so he could fit the two twin-size beds side-by-side between the closet and the wall. He lost all of deposit, and rumour has it that he was charged more on top of that for all of the damages. I walked out of that room just feeling unclean and violated, like I needed a shower.
After the dons had finished inspecting the rooms and had had lunch, I returned to my room to finish up my packing and load up the car. While I was in there, I had my music playing full blast (literally) to drown my sorrows of a horrible term at St. Paul's. I figured since there were exactly three people left in the college at this point, none of whom lived on my wing, no one would be bothered by it; However, Jason* and Rob* (RLC and Dean, respectively) came up to my floor to check out the damage to my neighbour's room; I wouldn't even had known they were there above the noise if I didn't see them walking past in the hall. I had a feeling that Rob thought that I had been playing my music like this all term long - not a good final impression on the dean.
The lock-in: One night (which happened to be the night before a major CS midterm), I heard my neighbours, Vince and Terrance, having a noisy conversation with some guests (Wesley, Colleen, and Tom). Terrance came by to ask me to look at their door - the locking mechanism was keeping the door from shutting, meaning that they couldn't close their door and "be quiet for the floor." I filled out an action form for them and dropped it off at the office, telling them it would probably be fixed the next day. Terrance thanked me and went back to his room.
Around 11:20pm, I heard the door slam shut. Loudly. I heard them pulling back and forth against the door, but it wouldn't open. Then I heard a bit of swearing, followed by, "Hey, call Rodney." Exactly two seconds later, my phone rang. They asked me to try to open the door from the hallway. I tried every which I could think of, but not even the don keys could turn the locking mechanism. The lock was jammed and they were trapped in there.
I called up two dons, Jason* and Monica, to help out. We tried using knives, coat hangers, and credit cards to get the door open, but nothing worked. After about 40 minutes of trying (and a large crowd gathering to watch the entertainment), Jason and I decided to call the lock service company. Thankfully, their phone number is stamped on every key that is distributed, so it was easy to get in touch with them. I left my phone number with the overnight service operator. A few minutes later, a groggy technician called me back to ask me what the problem was. I explained the situation to him, and agreed to come over.
About 30 minutes later, he showed up. He started by trying the handle, then pounding against the door. He started asking us if there were other ways to get into the room. "Well, we could get the ladder and go in the window; the guys inside might be able to sleep somewhere else tonight."
"There's people inside?" he replied. "You never told me that!" (I had, repeatedly.) "We've got to get them out of there. In my 15 years in this job, this is only the third time I've had people trapped inside a room - usually they're locked out."
"Could you go faster? I really have to go to the bathroom," yelled Wesley.
"Use an empty bottle," I yelled back.
He went out to his truck, grabbed an electric chainsaw, and cut off the doorknob. He then pulled as much of the locking mechanism out as he could, and had the people on the other side pull out the rest. He yelled at everyone in the room to stand as far as back as possible. He gave the door several huge kicks where the doorknob had once been, and after a few tries the door burst open. Wesley then darted out of the room and ran down the hall to the washroom. The others filed out to get some fresh air. At this point it was around 1:45am.
The moral of the story? If you know that your door is broken, it's probably not a good idea to force the door closed so that you can drink your beer underage in privacy. Not only will you be locked inside, but you'll have to hold in all that beer for a few hours while waiting to go to the washroom.
The creepy guy: This one comes from a term where I wasn't a don, but I got to hear all sorts of stories from people who were. (Friends in high places, as it were.)
We had a guy, Sven, living at St. Paul's who had never lived there before. He was tall and lanky guy, and always had a blank expression on his face, so you couldn't really tell what was going on in his mind (although after a few short conversations with him, I knew that he was smart academically).
During the supper hours, I would see him in random locations throughout the college - the chapel, the boardroom, MacKirdy Hall, the TV Lounge, and so on. And he would be eating his dinner in these areas. Now, if you know the rules of St. Paul's, one of the rules that is banged into your head on the first day is that trays of food normally don't leave the caf.
"Hey, Sven," I asked him one evening as he was eating dinner, "you know that we're only supposed to eat in the caf, right?" "Are you a don?" he asked me. "Well, not this term, but..." He then turned back to eating his food in front of the TV. I asked one of my don friends, Lindsey, about it later on that night, and she said that the don team was figuring out how to proceed. They eventually decided that since Sven was antisocial and wasn't comfortable in the caf, he would be allowed to eat his food in the chapel foyer, if he so desired, but that was it. (He flagrantly broke that rule, but it wasn't my place to correct him.)
Sven was also very territorial with where he would study or lounge around. One night, he was studying in Bunker Lounge, and when a pair of girls came down the stairs to study there, too, he yelled at them until they left. After hearing a few reports of this, Jason* (Residence Life Coordinator) and Mike (former don) would walk around the college some evenings, checking lounges and common areas to see if Sven was anywhere. After one such walk-around, they rested in the boardroom to talk. "I guess that Sven isn't around tonight," Jason commented. At that moment, Sven pokes his head out from underneath the boardroom table and looks at them, frightening the daylights out of Jason and Mike.
Also, Sven would randomly walk into the single rooms of girls who lived on his floor. Sometimes he would just walk in and set himself down on a bed to engage in conversation, while other times it would be in the middle of the night and he would just stand there, watching the girl sleep. Naturally, this creeped out everyone on the floor to the point where whenever some girls walked into their rooms, they would immediately close and lock the door so that no one else could enter. And if anyone knocked, they would refuse to open the door until they knew for certain that Sven wasn't there.
Near the end of the term, I was talking with Lindsey about how she had found donning that term, and she said that living with Sven had been frustrating - so much so that the don team had spent more time talking about Sven in their don meetings than any other student in recent memory.
A few months later, I was cutting through St. Jerome's to get to St. Paul's, when I ran into Sven. He said that he was now living at St. Jerome's, and then asked if I was still living at SPUC. I said that I was, and I kept on walking past him to SPUC; I didn't want to get involved with a crazy stalker guy like that.
Red-handed blackboard: The term before moving in to St. Paul's for one of my donning assignments, there had been incidents of inappropriate things being written on the blackboards and on certain people's doors. I won't elaborate on what was written, but they were of a cruel, sexual nature. I had been warned by the RLC and Dean to watch out for people writing on the blackboard - if anyone was caught, they would be awarded a red card (resulting in an automatic $100 fine).
So, on the first day of the new term, I had written a nice "Welcome to St. Paul's!" message on the blackboard (which was conveniently located near my room). While I was inside changing my clothes with the door closed, I heard someone lightly writing on the blackboard. Did I ever mention that my keen sense of hearing was one of my greatest assets as a don? So I quickly got changed, listened through the door, and then opened the door and walked out into the hall.
I looked at the blackboard, and then turned to the three guys standing there. "So, which of you wrote "PENIS" on the blackboard?" They all looked at the ground and denied having written it on there. I had talked with Bartholomew* before and knew that he was genuinely good guy and would never do that, but I had been warned about Vince and Aidan. However, I wasn't going to play favourites with them (especially on the first day of the term), so I asked each of them individually, and all of them denied it again.
I told them about the new blackboard rule, and Vince spoke up. "We're just writing a body part on here. It's not our fault that people are offended. It's no different than writing 'leg' or whatever."
"I don't care about what you write," I replied, "but the rule is the same for everyone. If there's someone you want to advertise on the blackboard, then please ask me first and I'll probably allow it; otherwise, don't write on the board." Vince tried pushing the envelope further, but I wouldn't bite. Aidan just looked stoned (and, as I later found out, he was for most of the term).
I didn't award a red card to any of them because I didn't have solid proof that they had done it and because I didn't want to give a card to honest Bartholomew. However, that was one of the worst things that was written on my blackboards that term, so maybe I scared them a little bit. Or, more plausibly, maybe they can't write in full sentences.
Throughout the rest of the term, I had to fix my blackboards on a near-daily basis because people would erase certain words/letters to change the meaning of my announcements, or they would wipe their fingers across the board. Not cool.
Moving out: One term, the don team was required to live at St. Paul's until move-out day so that we could help inspect all of the rooms and check for damage. A handful of rooms were immaculately clean - you could tell that these people had put in the effort to dust, vacuum, and empty the garbage. Most rooms were passably clean - not vacuumed or dusted, and there was a bit of garbage out, but no damage. There were also a few who lost their deposit because of damages to the room - a broken chair, holes in the wall, and the like.
And then there was a small handful of rooms that were just disgusting. Kelvin (who had only turned 19 that year) had left around 30-40 empty bottles of alcohol on top of his closet, plus lots of empty beer bottles. We guessed that he had consumed in the neighbourhood of $800-1000 of alcohol that year. We informed Kelvin that he would lose his $150 room deposit, and he promptly came back to gather his bottles (and return them for a deposit at The Beer Store).
But my favourite room was actually my neighbour's room from that term. There was a point in that term where he had been gone for about two weeks (which was great, since he lived alone and neighboured the bed side of my dorm room, meaning that I could go to bed without any noise). Other nights he would have 3 or 4 guys over late into the night and I would have to tell them to shut up. It seemed like he was rarely around the college, except to treat his bedroom as one of his pads to hang out in with his buds.
On move-out day, we inspected his room. Upon opening the door, the first thing that we saw was a ton of garbage scattered across the room - cigarette packages, Coke cans, papers, beer bottles, facial tissue, and anything else you could think of. Above his desk, he had affixed his keys to the wall using masking tape. (This was instead of the well-advertised policy of returning your keys to a don.) At least the keys were easy to find - I presume he was worried about losing his key deposit.
We walked around to the backside of the room, and we saw that he had removed the four closet doors and had them resting against a wall; this was so he could fit the two twin-size beds side-by-side between the closet and the wall. He lost all of deposit, and rumour has it that he was charged more on top of that for all of the damages. I walked out of that room just feeling unclean and violated, like I needed a shower.
After the dons had finished inspecting the rooms and had had lunch, I returned to my room to finish up my packing and load up the car. While I was in there, I had my music playing full blast (literally) to drown my sorrows of a horrible term at St. Paul's. I figured since there were exactly three people left in the college at this point, none of whom lived on my wing, no one would be bothered by it; However, Jason* and Rob* (RLC and Dean, respectively) came up to my floor to check out the damage to my neighbour's room; I wouldn't even had known they were there above the noise if I didn't see them walking past in the hall. I had a feeling that Rob thought that I had been playing my music like this all term long - not a good final impression on the dean.
The lock-in: One night (which happened to be the night before a major CS midterm), I heard my neighbours, Vince and Terrance, having a noisy conversation with some guests (Wesley, Colleen, and Tom). Terrance came by to ask me to look at their door - the locking mechanism was keeping the door from shutting, meaning that they couldn't close their door and "be quiet for the floor." I filled out an action form for them and dropped it off at the office, telling them it would probably be fixed the next day. Terrance thanked me and went back to his room.
Around 11:20pm, I heard the door slam shut. Loudly. I heard them pulling back and forth against the door, but it wouldn't open. Then I heard a bit of swearing, followed by, "Hey, call Rodney." Exactly two seconds later, my phone rang. They asked me to try to open the door from the hallway. I tried every which I could think of, but not even the don keys could turn the locking mechanism. The lock was jammed and they were trapped in there.
I called up two dons, Jason* and Monica, to help out. We tried using knives, coat hangers, and credit cards to get the door open, but nothing worked. After about 40 minutes of trying (and a large crowd gathering to watch the entertainment), Jason and I decided to call the lock service company. Thankfully, their phone number is stamped on every key that is distributed, so it was easy to get in touch with them. I left my phone number with the overnight service operator. A few minutes later, a groggy technician called me back to ask me what the problem was. I explained the situation to him, and agreed to come over.
About 30 minutes later, he showed up. He started by trying the handle, then pounding against the door. He started asking us if there were other ways to get into the room. "Well, we could get the ladder and go in the window; the guys inside might be able to sleep somewhere else tonight."
"There's people inside?" he replied. "You never told me that!" (I had, repeatedly.) "We've got to get them out of there. In my 15 years in this job, this is only the third time I've had people trapped inside a room - usually they're locked out."
"Could you go faster? I really have to go to the bathroom," yelled Wesley.
"Use an empty bottle," I yelled back.
He went out to his truck, grabbed an electric chainsaw, and cut off the doorknob. He then pulled as much of the locking mechanism out as he could, and had the people on the other side pull out the rest. He yelled at everyone in the room to stand as far as back as possible. He gave the door several huge kicks where the doorknob had once been, and after a few tries the door burst open. Wesley then darted out of the room and ran down the hall to the washroom. The others filed out to get some fresh air. At this point it was around 1:45am.
The moral of the story? If you know that your door is broken, it's probably not a good idea to force the door closed so that you can drink your beer underage in privacy. Not only will you be locked inside, but you'll have to hold in all that beer for a few hours while waiting to go to the washroom.