RA Stories: And luckily for Jim, I do love my job!

So I was on duty one Thursday night near the beginning of the semester, you know, the lovely time of year when all the freshman residents seem to forget their keys and get locked out at ungodly hours when they're partying every night of the week.

The night started out heinously enough with many noise violations and various write-ups, when I encountered one resident, Jim, who is the typical blonde spikey-haired freshman with the body of a football player who tries to fit his muscles into tight pink polos with popped collars, because ya know, its cool. Anyways, he was drinking beer in the hallway and I told him that I knew he was underage and that he had to dump the beer. He made some snide comments about me acting all "big and tough" when this guy is easily a foot taller than me. So I told him that if he didn't dump the beer, I would call the police and see what they thought about his underage drinking and refusal to cooperate. He made some more comments about how I was power tripping and must love my job etc, and ended up dumping the beer. I ignored it and moved on.

I continued my rounds when I stepped in pee in the hallway, slipped and lost my flip-flop. I had to hop to the nearest RA's door to ask him if I could borrow some shoes to finish rounds in. I walked around the rest of a building in a really big pair of those spikey Adidas sandals that forms to your foot. Unfortunately they were not formed to my feet and really hurt and were very awkward to walk in. Needless to say, I was not having a good night.

Once in bed, I received various calls having to deal with puke in bathrooms and lock-outs, etc. I finally ended up falling asleep at about 3:00am and my phone rang yet again at about 4:00am. It was another lock-out so I told the resident that I would meet him in the lobby so I could get him his backup key and let him in.

So I went to the lobby and it was none other than Jim. We walked next door to where the cluster office was, I gave him his key and he left while I did the paperwork. When I went outside, he was on his knees in the dirt searching for the key because he dropped it in the dark. I started to help him look and after about 20 minutes of searching, I gave up and told him I would go get the master key and let him in. I went back into the cluster office, retrieved the master key and was going to meet him outside, when the knocked on the window to let me know that he had found the backup key. So I put the master key back, went back to my room and went to bed. Five minutes later, he called saying that his key didn't work. We met back in the lobby, next-door to the cluster office again. I put his key in the ARD's mailbox with a note saying that it wasn't working, took the master key and went to his room.

Much to my surprise, the master key wasn't working either. So I had to call Emergency Maintenance to let them know that he couldn't get into the room. They told me that the maintenance man would want his backup key, so I had to go next-door yet again, put back the master key and give him his backup key. I told him that maintenance would help him and I was going to bed. Then about 10 minutes later I got another call from him saying that the Emergency maintenance man wanted the master key because he couldn't get the backup key to work. So I had to go next-door again, get the master key and go to his room to meet Jim and the maintenance man. He tried for a long while to get both keys to work and couldn't, so he told me he would have to call a locksmith. It took about 20 minutes for the locksmith to get there while I had to sit on the floor in the hall with Jim waiting for him.

During those 20 minutes, Jim found a few bobby pins on the floor and tried to pick the lock to no avail. I thought it was a bit odd that there just so happened to be bobby pins on the floor, but I was too tired to think anything of it. When the locksmith finally arrived, he removed the lock and discovered that small, black piece of rubber had been lodged in the lock, preventing the keys from opening it. The small, black piece of rubber belonged to a bobby pin that Jim tried to pick the lock with because he was being to lazy to go down and get a backup key.

Finally when Jim's door was open, the room was filled with beer cans from one end to the other. On top of having to deal with that, I still had to go back next door to put the keys away. I went back to my room and went to bed at about 6:00am.

That was by far the worst night of my RA life.

And luckily for Jim I do love my job, just not nights like that.