32 College Stories That Always Make Friends Laugh

In recent years, I've somewhat lazily put these articles together. Not because I don't see value in them but because there's massive labor involved in converting a list into a proper article. This year, I'm bringing back the long form birthday article because I started working on this back in 2024 before I turned 30. Don't expect any future articles to look like this. I just wanted to have these memories written out. At any rate, without further ado, let's get to the storytelling! Also, it's been 10 years since I graduated, so this seems like the right time to post this. A Stroll Down Memory Lane Roughly a decade ago, I graduated from my undergrad in Computer Engineering, but the stories only end there. In fact, I started college at the age of 18 in 2012. Back then, I didn't really know what college was all about, and I certainly didn't know what I wanted to do as a career. So, before I kick off these 32 stories, I wanted to give a little background and overview about that experience. Broadly, I spent four years in undergrad. When I came into college, I studied computer engineering because I thought that would be a nice balance between hardware and software. At the same time, I was deeply interested in music, so I secretly auditioned to be a music major. For a short 8 weeks, I tried to balance both before ultimately settling on the engineering degree. The next four years involved a lot of highs and lows. For instance, in my sophomore year, I went abroad to the UK for a semester. By junior year, I was heavily involved in an organization called the Residence Hall Association. During my senior year, I kept the music, travel, and RHA activities going while also joining a fraternity. Over four years, I learned a lot about myself. In our current productivity-obsessed accolade-filled world, the experiences I previously described seem to be the only ones that matter. However, achievements don't make you who you are. There is so much more to you. As a result, I wanted to pay homage to the broader college experience by sharing 32 stories that capture the more authentic experience of college. These are the stories that we often retell within the friend group as they bring about a sense of nostalgia while also helping new folks into the inner circle. However, I am going to be frank: these stories are long. While it might seem impossible to capture four years of my life in an article, I certainly tried. Therefore, to help, I'm going to drop a list of "characters" here, so you can refer back if you get lost. Obviously, these are mostly fake names to protect the identities of real folks. Mack, one of my best friends since freshman year Roger, one of my best friends since freshman year Josh, one of my best friends since freshman year Robin, a friend from freshman year Andrew, an enemy from freshman year Blondie, a dipshit suitemate from sophomore year Jimbo, the other dipshit suitemate from sophomore year Jack, a fraternity brother and roommate from senior year Also, I tried to keep the stories organized chronologically to give the stories a sense of flow. As a result, we'll kick things off with freshman year! Freshman Year During my freshman year, I lived in a traditional residence hall with shared rooms on the north side of campus. At the time, I had a roommate, of whom I don't really plan to write about, and three close friends that I met early that year: Mack, Roger, and Josh. Most of the stories follow these characters. Otherwise, I'll introduce them as we go! Before that, however, I should mention that the interesting stories sort of ramp up as I got further in my education. Therefore, I'll keep freshman year quick with six short stories. $500 T-Shirt To kick off the series of stories I have for you, I wanted to start with a light one that lead to the phrase, "$500 T-shirt." When I first made it to college, I found that a lot of the folks around me had this gray t-shirt with this brain art on the front. While most folks had one, my buddy, Mack, and I did not. Naturally, we pressed others on where they got their shirts, and no one could really give us a good answer—just that they got them in the mail. After some time, Mack and I put two and two together: you only got that t-shirt if you paid the damn enrollment deposit. Because the two of us qualified as "poor" by the university, we were able to get the deposit waived. However, if you did so, you lost out on a t-shirt. Of course, whether you paid the deposit or not, you still had to pay that money to the university. So, Mack and I never got our $500 t-shirts. 5:36 One character that reoccurs during my freshman year was someone we'll call Andrew. Andrew was very much someone that we didn't enjoy being around. There were many reasons for that—as I'm sure will be clear later—but one reason was his total lack of respect for privacy. Just about every day, Andrew would hunt one of us down in the bathroom before dinner time, presumably as a means to corner us into going to dinner with him. I don't really understand why he was so afraid to eat alone, but it was really annoying to be stripped of what little privacy we had in a dorm. In retaliation, Mack starting telling him a vague time in the range of 5:30 and 6:00. Of course, the funny bit was the phrasing. It would usually go something like, "I don't know. Five-thirty (slight pause) six." What Andrew never picked up on was that we would literally leave for dinner at 5:36. So, while he was waiting around to eat, we'd head out at our normal time. If he was paying attention, he'd head out with us. If not, he'd end up going alone. All-in-all, I find it quite funny, and it felt like a minor way of getting back at him for his nightmare of a personality. More on that later. "It's Fine, Dickhead" Since we've already started talking about Andrew, I figured it would be a great time to mention one of my favorite stories about him. I don't remember the exact timeline, but it had to be pretty deep into our first year as we grew more frustrated with him. Another one of Andrew's qualities was that he never really came off as sincere. If he ever engaged in small talk, he never really got the tone right. It always seemed like he was judging you or going through the motions. Well, one time at dinner (perhaps unsurprisingly), Andrew approached Mack and famously asked him, "how's the soup?" Now, it's really hard to sell just how funny this interaction was, but you can imagine that Andrew asked this question in the most condescending way possible. Again, I cannot reiterate how sort of uncharismatic Andrew was as a person. He never really tried to make friends, and he was always so rude to everyone. To give you a taste of what I mean, we used to have this friend who I'll call Robin. One time we were eating dinner (again, naturally), and somehow the topic of women in the military came up. Personally, I am somewhat against even the concept of the military, but I think it's absurd to say that women can't be soldiers. Even if you believed that women don't belong in the military, you would most likely never say it to a woman's face. Well, Andrew did. The hilarity of this was that Andrew was a fairly small and weak guy. Robin, the woman he said this to, could have easily beaten him in a fight. So, the absurdity of the situation was on full display. If the "women don't belong in the military" take gives you an idea of his politics, he claimed to be a libertarian, but I'd mark him as more of an anarcho-capitalist. He was really into the privatization of everything, so much so that we would often weaponize it against him. For instance, one time he came to class, and Mack and I told him we "privatized the row," so he couldn't sit with us. Given all that context, when asked "how's the soup?," Mack said, "it's fine, dickhead." Escalating Scuffles While Andrew was really annoying to just about everyone who knew him, I was particularly annoyed with him because we were in the same major. As a result, I had to see him far more often than my peers, and eventually it boiled over into a few physical altercations. To put things into perspective, I'm not a particularly big or tough guy. I'm maybe 5'10", and back then I was easily 150 pounds soaking wet. On the other hand, Andrew was probably a couple of inches shorter than me and maybe the same weight. Now, to set up these scuffles, I need to talk a bit about a recurring theme in my college experience: pranks. My three closest friends, which includes Mack but also a couple of folks that have yet to be introduced, used to prank each other regularly. Perhaps I'll share a story about one of my favorite pranks later. Anyway, one silly recurring prank involved popping a hole in the top of a water bottle and spraying a bit of water under a dorm room door. This was one of those harmless pranks that was just annoying, especially if you got wet socks. Well, as Andrew started to annoy us more, our prank group teamed up and turned on him. Every so often, we would spray a bit under his door without him knowing it. Now, again, I'm the type to laugh at anything, so obviously it was impossible for me not to be found out. Of course, when I was found out, instead of getting me back by spraying water under my door, Andrew came at me directly with his water bottle. In this first scuffle, I managed to wrestle the bottle toward Andrew and put him in a headlock. Once he realized he had lost, he asked me to let him go, and I let him walk. Another time, two of my friends and I walked in on Andrew in his room. I don't really remember what we were doing, but I remember he started attacking me. For context, I was easily the smallest guy in the room, so this felt a little pathetic. Regardless, I wrestled him to his bed before he said, "how are you so strong?"—a quote that sort of lives rent free in my head. Perhaps the third and final straw came about when I was gaming in Roger's room, another one of my close friends. At some point, Andrew walked in behind us as we were gaming and started antagonizing us. Again, I really don't remember what he said, but I remember getting pretty annoyed. Eventually, things boiled over, and I got up, turned around, and pushed him with both arms. At that point, it was almost like a cutscene in the way that he fell backwards over Roger's guitar case. When he got up, he just ran out of the room. Apparently, the noise caught the attention of other folks on our floor because people kept coming in to congratulate me, as if I had slain some great evil. Looking back, I don't feel see great about how our relationship turned out or how I personally behaved, but I realize that some people are just incompatible. We were never going to make that friendship work. So, as you can imagine, I've never spoken to the man again. He even ended up switching majors, so I never had to see him again. Live Action Scavenger Hunt As I've mentioned before, the boys and I enjoyed a good prank. One of my favorite pranks from freshman year was when Roger and I slowly moved Josh's things around the residence hall. It's important to note that Mack and Josh were roommates, so the way this prank worked was that Mack kept the room open while keeping his mouth shut. From there, Roger and I cycled through Josh's half of the room, grabbing key items and moving them to random locations throughout the residence hall. For instance, one of us grabbed his pillow and shoved it into one of the dryers downstairs. Likewise, another one of us grabbed his blanket and put it in the utility closet across the haul. When Josh caught on, it basically turned into a cycle of chasing one of us down while the other was moving his stuff. I just remember frantically running into the room, grabbing something, and racing to a random location in our building. Of course, because we're not evil, we shared all the details with Josh, so none of his stuff was lost. In fact, I recall Mack jumping in at the end to make sure he got all of his things back. Though, you should know that this wasn't the last time we did this: the same prank made a comeback during sophomore year, except we hid literal clues. Must Be Construction As will become a recurring theme in this series, our buddy Mack was an expert of deception. He could spin basically any scenario in his favor, and I think the first time I really got to see it in action was during freshman year. Specifically, we had these vending machines on the first floor of our residence hall, and they were situated right between the staircase to the second floor and the hallway to the mailboxes and laundry. If I'm recalling correctly, the staircase was also right next to a ton of bike storage and the building's main office which hosted the residence hall director. Often, before we would head up to our rooms, we would check out the vending machine to see if anyone left any change. Perhaps because we went to a university with a lot of rich kids, we were usually right to check. At the same time, the vending machines were often very broken. Even with some free cash, the items would often get stuck. As a result, we would sometimes tip the vending machines to get the items to fall out. One time, I remember Mack having some trouble getting his snack to come out, so he pushed the machine. However, this time, he had pushed it a bit hard than he meant to, and the machine came slamming down with a loud noise. It was so loud, in fact, that the resident hall director came out to inspect. Through his art of deception, Mack handled the situation by claiming that he also heard that sound and thought maybe it was the nearby construction. It was so effective that the residence hall director just walked away satisfied. "I Have to Shoot Him" Prior to going to college, I was pretty avid gamer. Pretty much all of my nights and weekends were dedicated to Halo, Gears of War, and Call of Duty. I don't think I was that great, but I was probably the best in my small town. Interestingly, when I made it to college, I was still quite a bit better than the friends I made. Of course, I'm not very competitive. In fact, I prefer to have fun, and fun for me in those kinds of games is metagaming. In other words, I would make little challenges for myself to keep things fun and interesting, like only using a ballistic knife or equipping insanely bad attachments to guns. Anyway, I used to play a lot of Search and Destroy, which is a game mode in Call of Duty where teams take turns planting a bomb. You basically get one life a round, so your goal is generally to get picks and stay alive. On one such occasion, I was either trying to plant or defuse, I don't really remember which. What I do remember, however, was that I was incredibly low on time, and I realized it far too late. So late, in fact, that had I tried to plant/defuse, I would have run out of time and lost the round. Instead, I famously said, "Oh, I have to shoot him." At that moment, I jumped up from the site and immediately began hunting the last player, which was Roger. Apparently, Roger was hoping to kill me in the plant/defuse process, so he was also headed my way. Within the span of 5 seconds, I left the site, found Roger, and shot him in the face with a ballistic knife. The moment was so insane that my friends still quote me to this day. In hindsight, Roger totally threw, but that's one of those old school LAN party moments that'll live with you forever. Sophomore Year By sophomore year, I moved into a 6-bedroom suite on the south side of campus. All five roommates were people from my first-year residence hall, of which included Mack, Roger, and Josh. The 3-Minute Pop-Tart Another common theme in these stories is that college was incredibly taxing on our minds. It made us do incredibly stupid things—though, most of that can probably be attributed to our developing frontal lobes. Regardless, this story is no different. One night, I was feeling hungry, and I decided to bust out a pop-tart. If you're wondering, the flavor was my personal favorite, brown sugar cinnamon. Anyway, I guess I was tired of eating them as-is, so I had this genius idea to heat them up in the microwave. Now, when I was a kid, I did this one time as well. However, when I did it back then, I just tossed the entire pop-tart in the microwave, wrapper and all. As you might know, the packaging on a pop-tart is mylar, which is a plastic that can be "metallized." In the case of pop-tarts, the wrappers are metallized with aluminum. When you pop those suckers in the microwave, prepare to see sparks. Anyway, by college, I learned to at least unwrap the pop-tart before putting it in the microwave. What I didn't learn is that you're only supposed to heat the pop-tart for 3 WHOLE SECONDS. That's literally what it says on the box. Naturally, I walked up to the microwave, pressed 3 after glancing at the directions, and walked away. As you probably know, a lot of microwaves will just kick on for however many minutes you press, so this one was set to go for 3 minutes. Yes, that's 60 times the intended cook time. I'll be honest. Like most of the stories here, I don't remember all the details vividly. In this particular scenario, I was really embarrassed, so all I really remember is everyone frantically working to put out a fire. I know that one of us grabbed a pizza box and started fanning the smoke to keep the smoke alarm from going off. I know another one of us literally picked the microwave up and moved it toward our 9th story window. By pure luck, the chaos ended without anyone getting hurt, except my mental state. The fire alarm never went off. The molten pop-tart never hit anyone on the way down. And, no one managed to get burnt or hurt in the scuffle. It really was a complete miracle. Burning Food Thankfully, I wasn't the only one burning food. During the first semester of my sophomore year, my room shared a corner of the suite with a guy also named Roger. To differentiate the two, we continued to call my closer friend his name, and we nicknamed the other guy Blondie. Prior to moving in together, I remember Blondie as a relatively bulky guy. He was probably my height, but like twice my width. Normally, I wouldn't comment on someone's looks, but they're kind of important for introducing him as a character. After all, when I first saw him sophomore year, he was down probably like 50 pounds. Before the golden age of Ozempic, I think the only way to really accomplish that was through an eating disorder and/or surgery. In other words, we were really worried about him. Of course, that worry faded away rather quickly because his new appearance granted him a superiority complex. When I first saw him for the semester, he opened with, "sup nerds!," like a caricature of a frat boy you might see in a movie. As you can imagine, his antics didn't exactly end with the verbal garbage. See, we also lived on the top floor of a 9-story apartment building that just so happened to have an elevator to only the 8th floor. That wouldn't be such a problem if we didn't have to evacuate the building twice a week for burnt food. While there were many young adults who couldn't seem to cook to save their lives, one of those cooks happened to be our beloved suitemates, Blondie. He was so bad at cooking that he was responsible for the fire alarm on at least three separate occasions in one semester. The primary reason he couldn't help burning food was because he was a bit of a fitness addict who couldn't go a meal without protein. In the mornings, he'd fire up bacon on a griddle that he shared with another one of our suitemates, Jimbo. I guess one of them would kick the griddle on in the morning and leave it on for the other guy to save time. In response, the other guy was responsible for cleaning it. As you can imagine, one of them refused to clean it, and they eventually ended up in a stalemate. Naturally, the griddle accumulated so much fat from the bacon that it actually caused a fire. I remember waking up one morning just moments before the fire alarm went off because I could hear panic in the common room. When I peaked outside my door, smoke billowed into my room. I remember just seeing a thick gray cloud of smoke floating at the top of our ceiling. In response, the fire department gave Blondie a pretty stern talk. Of course, rather than learning his lesson, Blondie would find every excuse for his inability to cook. This all boiled over when I had my normie friends from home come visit one time. We were all sitting in our common room hanging out when Blondie started to cook some food. At the time, Blondie either started burning his food or someone joked about him burning his food because he then said, "I wish we lived on the other side of the building, so we could get a better cross-breeze to deal with the smoke." To which my buddy responded, "or, you could maybe just not burn the food." Perhaps it was because my buddy was an outsider, but everyone sort of froze while holding in their laughter. To me, what made the exchange even funnier was that he asked Mack how to cut an onion just moments prior. I don't mean to gatekeep cooking, but if you have to ask how to cut an onion, what are you doing near a hot pan? Salty Protein Powder Given Blondie's annoying personality and propensity for burning food, it was only natural that we would prank him a little. See, Blondie was one of those typical engineering students that felt they were smarter than everyone. As a result, we had this idea to mess with him by putting salt into his protein powder. Now, looking back, I don't condone this kind of prank. While tampering with food is a common way of getting back at a coworker, it's extremely dangerous. Salt, specifically, is not a chemical I would mess with, as chubbyemu points out in his horse electrolyte video. Thankfully, it's pretty obvious when something is too salty to consume. With that said, I don't remember who came up with the idea, but I know for a fact that Josh was the one to do it. That detail is important, not for absolving anyone of sin, but because Josh denies it. Anyway, Blondie caught on quickly, but Mack was a master of deception. So, he told Blondie that perhaps protein powder actually gets salty over time naturally. Then, because I was a heavy lifter at the time, he told Blondie to confirm with me. When I confirmed that protein powder gets salty over time, he went out of his way to "prove" it. I seemed to be the catalyst that sent him down a rabbit hole because he then began writing out chemical equations. Somehow, he managed to prove to himself that protein powder will react with itself or the air to produce salt, which made his protein powder salty over time. He then never brought the issue up again. Personally, I find the whole idea of being so arrogant that you can convince yourself of lies to be really funny. Playing Taps During that same semester, one of the guys got us really into Chuck Mangione. If you don't know who that is, he was basically a professional jazz musician known especially for playing the flugelhorn. At the time of writing, Chuck sadly passed last year. I don't know how we got to listening to Chuck Mangione, but I know he was featured in King of the Hill. We used to watch a lot of "KOTH edit"-style videos back then (e.g., "start puffin' boy"), so it's hardly surprising that Chuck made his way into our lives. Anyway, Roger was really interested in picking up a brass instrument, so he got a hold of a flugelhorn. It just so happened that Roger's birthday was coming up, so we thought it would be fun to surprise him by playing the beginning of Feels So Good for him. I don't remember if I was playing an instrument or not, but I do remember that Josh had the flugelhorn. As Roger walked in, Josh started to play Feels So Good—except it didn't come out as Feels So Good. It came out as taps, like the kind the military might play at a funeral. This naturally caused all of use to erupt in laughter while Roger couldn't make sense of what was happening. I suppose taps was a solid piece to play because not long after that, Mack and I abandoned the suite to study abroad. We Got a Runner Just prior to going abroad, we had our finals week. Anyone who has been to college knows that finals week can be a bit of a mess. After being trapped with the same guys for 15 weeks, the thought of locking in to study for finals can seem like a nightmare. This can leave a lot of people on edge, and it can also lead to some really strange behaviors. For instance, I remember being in the common room laying on the floor pushing the couch up and down, as one does. Josh or Mack (I can't remember which) had just finished baking some cookies. I think the idea was to try to check in on Roger, who we had not seen all day. As they went back to knock on Roger's door, Roger burst out of his room like the Kool-Aid man. Since I'm trapped under the couch, I don't really get a feel for what's happening, but I see Roger run out of the suite. Before chasing him, we peek out the window to see if we can see where he went. From there, we watch him wander off into one of the nearby dorms. So, we decide to head out after him. For the next half hour or so, we try to hunt Roger down. We wander through the nearby buildings and try to pin him down. Eventually, we end up in a standoff with him outside. I run up on him and grab him but only get a hold of his hoodie. He spins out of the grab to review that he's completely shirtless in the dead of winter. In the sheer confusion, we let him go. This was one of those fever dream moments in my college experience that I haven't really seen replicated since. I don't understand what overcame Roger, but I assume the stress just got to him. Stolen Ice Cream Also at some point during the first semester of sophomore year, I remember we had this genius idea to see if we could steal an entire tub of ice cream from the dining hall. We're talking those like 3 gallon tubs of ice cream that are cardboard on the outside. As will probably become clear throughout this article, theft was a somewhat normal part of our college experience. For instance, I don't think I mentioned it above, but we once had a competition to see how much bread we could take from the dining hall. While everyone was trying to sneak slices, one of my buddies asked the staff if he could take a couple of loafs because of gluten issue or something (he won, of course). Anyway, this time around we decided to go big and steal one of the tubs of ice cream. To do it, we moved as a pack. One of the guys pulled the ice cream tub out, and the rest of us stood around him like a sort of crowd. Once he had the tub, we walked as a pack to the exit. Somehow this ludicrous experiment ended in success. We wandered with it back to the dorms before ditching it somewhere. It was mostly empty anyhow, but we wanted to see if it could be done. Junior Year By junior year, I moved into a 4-bedroom suite with my three closest friends, Mack, Roger, and Josh. This time, of course, we were in upper class housing on north side. Cinema Night One of my favorite memories from college happened during the first semester of my junior year. At the time, I lived in a four-bedroom suite with Mack, Roger, and Josh. If you were to come into the suite, you would see all four of our rooms lined up with mine being the second from the entrance. Across from our rooms were two bathrooms that we naturally split between the first two rooms and the last two rooms. Then, after passing all four rooms, you would end up in our kitchen, which was directly connected to our living room. I am illustrating the structure of the suite because it was crucial for what was probably one of the most cursed nights of my life. Now, I don't exactly recall why everything went down the way it did, but I do remember splitting into a pair of factions in the suite: the two of us who went abroad, Mack and I, and the two who hadn't, Roger and Josh. I bring this up because, as I think I've already made clear, we used to prank each other back and forth. Well, the story all starts when the other faction was having "cinema night," which I can only describe as an anime marathon in the living room. While that was happening, my faction planned to mess with their cinema night by cutting the power to the suite. For whatever reason, we found that you could easily pry open the breaker box at the front of the suite near the entrance. From there, it was only a matter of flipping the main breaker to cut all power to the suite. Of course, we wanted to make a spectacle of the thing, so we also had a few extra plans up our sleeves. For instance, we knew they would have to go to the front of the suite to turn the breaker back on, so we spilled a bunch of water on the floor to get their socks wet. Then, we also planned to duct tape the panel shut once we had turned off the power. Given that it would be pitch black, we figured it would take them a moment to work their way through the water, find the duct tape, and open the panel. Now, the funny bit is that we executed this plan flawlessly. We basically had the panel open, the breaker pulled, the panel taped, and our quiet exit in maybe 20 seconds flat. And because we lived on the first floor, we also planned to run outside and watch the carnage from the window. What we saw I could only describe as our own cinema night. To really paint the picture, I need you to realize that it wasn't just the other faction we messed with; they had a guest. Specifically, the guest was Josh's girlfriend. At this point, I am sure you can imagine the dynamic of two college guys immediate looking to prove their manhood. When we peered through the window, all we could see was two men in a fit of rage. Rather than addressing their power issue, each of them assumed a role. Roger was responsible for getting some light, so rather than pulling out his phone, he spawned a tactical flashlight. Meanwhile, Josh was on the hunt for us. In pure comedy, I watched as he backed up to each of our bedrooms and begin bucking the door with his foot. After watching for a moment or two, we decided to leave the area for a bit, much like you might when you have a wanted level in GTA. Naturally, we walked to the other side of campus to kill some time. Specifically, we wandered into one of the buildings on south campus that has a pool table. When we made it inside, we ran into a goofy security guard who—I shit you not—admitted to us that he had thousands of illegally downloaded songs on his iPod. After some time, we made our way back to our suite. The scene was what I could only describe as a warzone. Our bathroom was completed destroyed. If I recall correctly, the room was flooded, and there was shaving cream all over the floors and mirrors. Apparently, in their fit of rage, one of the guys used the other guy's shaving cream in the massacre, which we got accused of weirdly. Eventually, things sort of cooled down, but not before one of the guys confronted me in my own bedroom. I don't remember how the conversation kicked off, but I distinctly remember him accusing me of "ruining their night." Perhaps I was a bit bitter at the time, but I replied, "no, you ruined your own night," which seemingly short-circuited his dialogue tree. Ultimately, I still stand by the prank being completely harmless, but I suppose you never really know how people will react. Mission Impossible Sometime during that same semester, we grew somewhat annoyed with Roger. Roger, while one of my closest friends, has some character flaws. One of them is that he hoards a lot of stuff. Famously, he had a storage unit before we ever even graduated college, and he used to get regular shipments from Amazon like multiple times a week. Anyway, when we were living with Roger during our junior year, he had accumulated a lot of stuff. Unfortunately, that stuff started making its way into our common room. For example, we had a massive cardboard flashlight sitting in the corner of our common room that we used to use like a basketball hoop. Likewise, Roger started moving some of his instruments out into our common room for communal use, theoretically. Mack and I got particularly annoyed by this because all of this stuff started taking up a lot of space. In retaliation, rather than behaving like a well-adjusted adult, we started messing with Roger's stuff. For instance, we would famously go out at like 3 AM and turn on one of the preloaded songs on the keyboard until he would come out and turn it off. If you're curious what kind of songs might be on a keyboard, you're in luck. The two I can remember off the top of my head were the "Mission Impossible Theme" and "Linus & Lucy" from Charlie Brown. Even listening to these songs makes me chuckle over a decade later. I also remember Roger refusing to back down, so we eventually stole the keyboard and put it in a hatch on the ceiling. Bro had so much stuff that he never even noticed it was gone. I have no clue if he ever got it back. Moving Appliances As you can probably tell, we pranked each other quite a bit over the years, and one really silly prank we pulled was to move all of the appliances in the suite. Yes, it's as stupid as it sounds. To be honest, I don't remember where we moved things. I think maybe the fridge was placed in one of the bathrooms and the oven was moved down the hall, perhaps even into the other bathroom. However, what I do remember is Roger coming home comically drunk. I don't think we were expected him to be drunk. We figured we'd confuse the guys and move the stuff back, but what happened instead was way funnier. Roger came back while Mack and I were hanging out in the common room. As a result, we decided to hide to see his reaction to the missing appliances. Since he was drunk, we were left with a wonderful show. Again, I don't remember all the details, but I distinctly remember him being annoyed that the oven was moved. He was the type of guy to come home and cook like two pounds of chicken nuggets for "bulking season." In fact, he once asked us to preheat the oven after one of his classes for precisely that purpose. Anyway, because he was hungry and drunk, we watched as he gradually moved the oven back to its original place. Of course, he didn't really push it in the normal way. He sort of humped it back into position. It took everything I could do not to die laughing. Later, I remember him coming to sit on the couch in the common room, which we were hiding beside. I think it took him a full couple of minutes to realize we were there. "Five Bucks, Man" Near the end of Autumn semester of my junior year, tensions were growing among our roommates. To be honest, this is a pretty natural phenomenon at college. After all, classes are tough, and semesters are structured in such a way that the stress tends to grow as finals get closer. Well, just prior to finals week, the university would always host a destress event. At this event, there was always a ton of free and paid merch that students would line up for in advance. As juniors, we were well aware of the need to get there early, so we grouped up in our common room. As we were waiting for the fourth guy to arrive, he popped into the suite. Naturally, we asked him if he was ready to go, and he told us that he had already been. "How is that possible? The event hasn't started yet.", we wondered. Well, as it turned out, his girlfriend was volunteering at the event and let him in during setup. In his infinite wisdom, he passed himself off as a volunteer and was able to buy one of the jackets for juniors before the event even started. Obviously, we were a bit annoyed by this because we wanted to go as a group, and he never told us he was going to blow us off. Personally, I was annoyed because he didn't even seem to care about going with us or care about helping at the event. He just wanted to get a stupid jacket. When I pressed him on it, he famously said: "five bucks, man." A phrase implying that the cost of the jacket was too cheap to pass up. In the moment, I blew up. I don't remember exactly what I said to him, but I'm sure I made him feel selfish. To this day, the phrase, "five bucks, man," still gets thrown around in the friend group. Needless to say, we don't talk to that guy anymore. Ball or Shaft During my junior year of college, the two roommates that we pranked regularly moved out. No, I will not be reflecting on that further. Interestingly, only one of those roommates gave us the heads up. The other one completely disappeared over winter break. Sometime over that break, we found out that we were getting two new roommates through an email. In a panic, my buddy and I texted each other to make sure both of us were still living together. When we got back for spring semester, we were greeted by two of the weirdest people on the planet. Without really getting into the weeds, I'll just say that they were both men, and they were nothing alike. One of the two—I'll just call him Edgar—had basically no boundaries. At random points throughout the semester, he would pull out a portion of his genitals and ask, "Ball or Shaft?" As you can imagine, there are no winners in this game. You have to look at a dude's junk and pose a guess at whether the anatomy you are looking at is in fact one of his testicles or a part of his shaft. Now, keep in mind that this was 2015, and I'm not sure that we had any concept of sexual harassment among men. Even now, I can't really make sense of this "game" as men really aren't equipped to talk about sexual harassment. What I will say is that it made everyone really uncomfortable, and I was extremely happy when that semester ended. To be clear, I wouldn't say its necessarily uncommon for guys to do weird shit like this. When I was in high school, I remember other boys would sometimes whip their balls out in class for shock value (for some reason the phrase "showing brain" is coming to me). Looking back, we really should not have normalized that kind of behavior. Perhaps that's why we never really did anything about Edgar. Murderer Under the Bed For a guy like Edgar to be able to expose himself to people he barely knows, it should come as no surprise that his unhinged antics had no end. In particular, he really hated the other new roommate, who we'll call Shane. Shane was a bit of an oddball himself. He had some misogyny issues he was battling as a nursing student, and he really believed the nursing school was out to get him for being a man. He also had a strange fascination with cats, and he made it basically impossible to exit a conversation without him getting in his two cents. Otherwise, he was a decent roommate. Edgar, however, hated Shane. I don't know why he hated Shane, and I don't know when the hate started. What I do know, however, is that Edgar would jokingly (I hope) talk about killing him. For instance, I remember him telling me about how he thought about slipping into Shane's room while he was showering. While inside, Edgar planned to hide under Shane's bed until he came back for the night. Then, while Shane was sleeping, Edgar planned to take him out. With the level of detail that Edgar had in his story, we probably should have reported him. Certainly, his propensity for violence was a red flag, as was his willingness to expose himself. I think even the fact that he moved in with us was a red flag. To this day, I wonder if he got kicked out of his old place for similar antics. Unfortunately, we sort of just laughed him off. In the end, I think we were just trying to survive that semester. Senior Year Finally, by senior year, I used my residence hall association powers to get us a 6-person suite in the same upper class housing from the year before. After the roommate debacle of the previous year, you might wonder why I opted for four more. Well, I'm somewhat of a masochist. We picked up four guys from the fraternity I joined. Needless to say, I have plenty of stories about those guys. "I Will Turn This Car Around" One of the roommates we picked up from the fraternity was named Jack. He was a bit of a character, as is perhaps unsurprising given that not single roommate I've ever had could be considered normal. Anyway, Jack had the room next to mine, which happened to be between Mack and I. We had this cool two-story suite with literal stairs in the middle. Three of us lived up top and two lived down below alongside the kitchen and the common room. One time, Jack offered to take me (and possibly my girlfriend at the time), Mack, and one of the roommates out to a county fair to eat funnel cakes and see farm animals. By that point, I think most of us had a car on campus (except me), so anyone could have taken us. Regardless, we decided to go with Jack. It's really hard to describe how strange Jack was as a person, so I'll just tell this story straight up. As Jack was driving us out to the fair, we started getting a little rowdy. Mack, who happened to be seated behind Jack, started messing with Jack's headrest. Again, it was pretty harmless. Mack basically just pulled the headrest off the seat. Naturally, if it was annoying Jack for whatever reason, Mack would have gladly stopped. Instead, Jack freaked out. In a sudden fit of rage, Jack shouted something to the effect of, "if you don't put the headrest back, I'll turn this car around!" Suddenly, it felt like being in the car with your dad who just got off a 12-hour shift and had to take you to swim practice. The entire eruption left literally everyone in the car speechless until we made it to the fair. "I Just Want to Learn How to Make GUIs" To help build a bit more lore around Jack, one of my other favorite stories about him was that he was studying some business related discipline. As a result, he was really out of touch in conversations with engineers (i.e., Mack and me). As is often the case with business majors, many of them look down on anyone doing actual labor, whether that be artists, engineers, mechanics, etc. Jack was no different. He was trying to get a computer science minor because he figured the skills were 1) easy to pick up and 2) money printers. As a result, when he actually had to take said computer science classes, I remember him bitching about them. Not in the way that I often bitch about them (e.g., being hijacked by mathematicians and not grounded in reality) but rather in an almost comically out-of-touch way: "I just want to learn how to make GUIs." In other words, to Jack, computer science wasn't a discipline of problem solving and logic but rather a means to produce customer interfaces. I could only imagine him now during the age of generative AI. He would be as bad as every tech evangelist I see online talking about how "AI is as bad as it's ever going to be" and "only Luddites reject the power of AI agents" while crafting literal slop as a race to the bottom. Needless to say, we (as in most of us in the suite) didn't really care for Jack, and we were really excited when he decided to study abroad in the spring. We even had a fun challenge going around the suite where we would see how close we could take a photo of us flipping him off without getting caught. I'd share a few if they weren't directly doxxing folks. Ice Cube Shot Put On the topic of frat bros, we weren't the only ones living our specific building. In fact, there was another cohort of guys who lived in the same suite we did the previous year, just a few floors up. As a result, we could actually see their window from ours. I'm not sure exactly how far the two windows were apart, but there was basically a whole courtyard separating the two. In addition, our main window was on the third floor while theirs was on the fourth. One night, we had the bright idea to see if we could get their attention by bouncing something off their window from ours. Obviously, we didn't want to throw anything we would have to retrieve, so we opted for ice cubes. To do this, we rolled out the main window and popped out the screen. Then, we (as in Mack and I) would take turns trying to throw ice cubes up to their window. I don't remember if we were ever successful, but I remember we were definitely in the ballpark most of the time. The funny bit was that another one of our roommates saw us doing it and wanted to join in. For the lack of a better pseudonym, I'm just going to call him Mole. There are some lore reasons for that, such as the fact that he was a tiny man who often slept among a molehill-like pile of clothes in his bed. While we were happy to let him join, we quickly realized he was quite far out of his depth. I'm not sure my man had ever thrown anything before. His technique for throwing the cubes was basically shot put, leading to the cubes going almost straight down from our window. What made it so funny was that he would play along like he was close. I would toss one, hit the brick a story down, and get excited from how close it was. Then, he would toss one directly into the asphalt below and say some shit like, "ah, I almost had it." That will never get old for me. Peepholes Near the very end of college—it might even have been senior week—I ended up getting pretty drunk with some friends of mine. It was so bad that we actually went out onto the track and ran some laps. I don't know why alcohol compels you to do stuff like that. Anyway, in my inebriated wisdom, I had this idea to steal the peepholes from everyone's front door. For whatever reason, they weren't secured to the doors, so you could just unscrew them. Naturally, I took a tour of our building with a couple of friends and popped maybe 50 off that night. I don't remember what I did with them. I think I might have stuffed them in someone's bag. Regardless, all I remember is getting a nasty email the next morning from our RA sarcastically stating how funny the prank was. I was so spooked out about what I had done the next morning that I frantically went and returned them all. I don't remember if I screwed them back in or just dropped them in front of doors, but I rapidly got rid of the evidence. Then, I behaved myself until I got my diploma and never looked back. Short Stories Looks like all I could really muster was 23 solid stories above. The last nine are listed here as brief memories or references that couldn't really be stretched out into a proper story: One night during freshman year, I remember getting a hold of a rolled up carpet and using it to break open one of our friend's doors—all while shouting "NYPD search warrant." In that same year, I also remember Mack playing a guy's trumpet in the dorms. The RA came by to tell him to stop and as the RA was walking away, Mack started playing again from inside the closet. Sophomore year was the year of Cards Against Humanity. I remember playing it in the dorm one time when I coined the term "dustbowl massacre." I don't know the context around it, but people in the group believed it was a real team. This caused guys to start referencing horrific historical events as if they were fake, like the Great Molasses Flood or the 72' Olympics. Also, I may have mentioned this one above, but it's too crass to share as a story itself. Basically, we had a roommate sophomore year that had a girlfriend. It turned out that girlfriend was cheating on him with another one of our roommates. We knew because she often sounded like a "whimpering dog." Oh, and she ended up with the other roommate later. Also during sophomore year, the two roommates that shared a girlfriend were in a "heated rivalry" over the griddle. Multiple times during the semester we had to leave the building because something on the griddle caught fire. They were basically in a stalemate because neither of them would clean it, so there was a grease fire like once a week. Sophomore year was also the dreaded time of Super Hexagon. One of the roommates had built a project setup and would play Super Hexagon for multiple hours a day at full volume. I can still hear the song in my sleep. By junior and even senior year, we had a buddy, Roger, who would often go missing for sometimes days at a time. He would get up one morning and just leave campus for a while. One time, I remember he went out to get tires from some guy for free, except they were in another state. I remember getting that text from him saying, "I fucked up. I'm in PA." This was a recurring theme for him, and we almost filed a missing persons report after he disappeared to Maryland for several days. Senior year we had a ton of roommates cycle in and out from our fraternity. I didn't really care for any of these guys, and one of them in particular was a creature. He used to eat really loudly, like imagine wet lip smacking and literal moaning. He also had a really disturbing collection of sock monkeys, and he filled our fridge up with a 12-pack of egg cartons (so, 144 eggs). He also had a revolving door of women he would have sex with, one of which let him use vegetable oil as lube. One of my favorite moments from college was when our fraternity became official. We had to go through the usual hazing rituals, and one of them had us answer questions that we got wrong on our written exams. Mack got asked something along the lines of, "how do you know when you've reached the top or become successful?" He said, "when you look up, and no one is above you." Bars. I'm sure there are other stories that I'll wish I had shared here, but I can't keep writing. This article is already up over 9,000 words, and I'd love to work on something else. Feeling 32 Looking back, it's actually crazy that it's been a decade since I graduated from college. These days, I'm doing the adult thing like raising my daughter and looking to buy a house. In fact, I'm fairly pleased with my own life, but the outside world isn't great. I think my 22-year-old self would be satisfied with my progress, but he was a bit of a chud. Anyway, this is the first time I've paywalled a birthday article. I feel somewhat bad about it, but I'm not sure I want all these stories publicly available (at least not for another decade). I did want to write these down though as a sort of diary entry for my future self. Also, I'm sure some of my friends would love to read this, and perhaps even correct some of the record. As always, thanks for reading. I hope you got some joy out of this piece. If not, there's another 600+ articles you can explore elsewhere. Take care!

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