Current students, of course, don’t remember anything about this except for vague rumors about someone who set off a fire alarm once.
It is annoying when the internet works faster at Starbucks than it does in my dorm room. But wireless rocks.
PS—any Bethany people want to buy a wireless card? Works with PCs and newer Macs. Only $60.
I live in Burnett South (I still don’t know why we had to change it from Victory Hall) and next year the men will be moving to the Spot. Which is interesting; I used to live in the Spot back in the ’90s. Our RA was asking us about which rooms we might like to have. I briefly flirted with the idea of requesting my old room (which, oddly enough, was once also my sister Kerry’s old room), then decided it wasn’t important. That was then. This is now. Gotta live in the now.
But speaking of then, I think I’ll tell you the story of how I flooded the Spot in 1996.
It was my second year; I had returned early because I was on the Senate and I had to participate in New Student Orientation. My roommate had not yet arrived. No one was there except the guys who had lived on campus all summer, the RA (Don, my former roommate), and the assistant RA (Steve, who would later live in mid-year to hook up with someone he met in Romania during his summer mission trip). All told, about five of us.
So I was busy stealing furniture out of one of the vacant rooms (I wanted to make sure my roommate had a good desk) when Ben, our last year’s RA and recent graduate, poked his head in the door. “What are you up to?” he asked, and we got to talking.
He had this miniature football—the kind that whistles when you throw it—and we started tossing the thing down the hallway. Since he was on his way out, the passes were getting longer and longer…
The sprinkler system in the Spot consists of small, easily-melted metal discs that hold a water pressure device in place. Heat from a fire is supposed to melt the disc and set off the sprinkler. But if you hit those discs just right with a football, as I managed to do, you could set the sprinkler off anyway.
So the water came down, the alarm went off, and Ben ran off to find someone to shut the water off. (Which he did. Then he joined the gathering crowd that was wondering why the alarm went off, and struck up a conversation with Bethany College’s new VP of Finance. “I think someone deliberately set off the fire alarm,” he told her.)
Steve came out of one of the other vacant rooms, where he had been busily trying to steal himself a cleaner mattress.
“Call someone!” I shouted. I glanced around for a bucket, wastebasket, anything.
Steve quickly ducked into his room. Five seconds later, he came out with a videocamera and began to film the cascade of water that was coming out of the ceiling.
“Put the videocamera down,” I shouted, “and call someone!”
“There are some maintenance guys outside,” he said. “They’re taking care of it.”
“Are you sure?” I said.
And then the water and alarm turned off. The maintenance guys had taken care of it.
I spent the next several hours mopping the hallway and two flooded rooms. Even so, the particle board beneath the hallway floor warped and buckled, making the hallway an interesting tripping hazard until maintenance could finally fix it over Christmas.
The flood had also shorted out an overhead light in the bookstore on the floor below the Spot. As I recall, Heather was there and would remember those details better than I would.
A new rule was added to the Handbook about how one should not throw footballs in the hallway. Ben didn’t show his face on campus for the next six months. And I was fined $50 for “vandalism,” which was doubled to $100 because I couldn’t afford to pay the fine within two weeks. (At least I didn’t have to pay to replace the floor. Insurance—I hope; you never know with all the cost-cutting they do around here—covered that.)
Comments…
Heather commented,
Ha ha ha. I was gonna chime in about that before you dropped my name. I wasn’t in the bookstore in ’96, though, so I guess flooding was just a regular thing in the Spot, ’cause it happened at least three times while I was there. Yep, rain in my office was a frequent occurrence in the bookstore. I think it happened when there was too much water on the bathroom floor, too. Eww.
Be thankful for the internet you have at Bethany now, ’cause remember how we used to only have access to Bethany Online in our rooms (and that was if one of the roommates was fortunate enough to actually have a computer)?
I mainly remember the two-hour time limit, and how my roommate would, after he used up all his time, would sign on as me and use up all my time. All this so he could be in the chat room with his then-girlfriend (and now-wife) instead of talking on the bloody phone.
Josh added,
My goal here at Bethany is now to create a rule in my name.
Go for it. But be careful which rule you get named after you. Years from now, when someone gets expelled from Bethany for committing a Herndon, your kids might not appreciate the story behind it.