I had a shitty roommate my first semester — stinking rich, wore too much cologne, referred to all of us as “half-breeds.” We came up with lots of boring ways to make his life miserable: storming into the room at 2 am with guitars seemed to work well. But the best pranks we came up with were, unfortunately, things we couldn’t use against him, if only because they would have ruined all my shit too. So instead, we market-tested the ideas elsewhere. The one that worked best? The hair-dryer trick.
It took some preparation, but the results were worth it. Ideally, you’d wait until the victim was going to be out of the room for at least half an hour; you’d need an accomplice who lived within a couple of rooms, an extension cord, and a one-pound bag of flour. First, you lay out big Scarface-size lines of powder on the floor, directly along the base of the door, no higher than the gap at the bottom of the door. Then, plugging in the hair dryer at the nearest available outlet, set to “high heat” and blow the lines under the door. Repeat until flour is gone.
The result, when your victim returns, is a room that has been completely dusted. It is almost impossible to de-flour a room thusly bombed. A damp cloth will turn a dresser into a doughy mess. A vacuum will inevitably scatter as much powder as it sucks in, which isn’t very much. More than likely, the victim will simply surrender and sleep that night in their floury bed, and wake up the next morning looking like a piece of fish ready for the frying pan.
Lesson learned: The most important piece of real estate in any dorm room is the eighth-of-an-inch space between the bottom of your door and its frame.
Sharon Steel, Boston University
Back in high school I spent the majority of my Friday nights watching The X-Files and composing mediocre poetry in a battered spiral notebook. So my parents never got the chance to experience the joy of seeing their only daughter stumble home drunk and stupid after a rowdy suburban kegger. They lived in a blissful state of denial until the last day of my freshman year of college, when my roommate convinced me we ought to celebrate the end of finals with Jose Cuervo.
At that point, neither of us had bothered so much as to take our suitcases out of the closet to pack up for summer break. Fast-forward to 12 hours later, and I’m lying on my stripped-bare, extra-long twin BU regulation mattress, vomming into empty Shaw’s-supermarket bags. My parents were horrified by the sight of my bloodshot eyes and liquor-laced breath — but even that wouldn’t have been so terrible if they hadn’t been forced to bundle up the entire contents of my room, peel all the posters off my wall, and drag me into the car for a traumatizing five-hour drive back to New York.
