This is one reason that I was happy to be on-call this halloween weekend. Each RA has one weeknight every week that s/he is responsible for being on call, as well as one weekend every quarter. Most often, being on-call simply means that you have to walk around all the dorms in your area after 11:15pm with your partner (RAs are always on call in pairs) as well as answering any calls on the on-call phone, which usually just means someone has locked themselves out of their room.
So for the past month since move in, I had gone on rounds four times (once a week), and had encountered nothing more severe than some noise policy violations. These are just a matter of knocking on a door, telling residents that they're being too loud, collecting their ID info, and moving on. Not terribly interesting.
I was quite excited, however, to be on-call for the weekend of Halloween, because it is a notoriously eventful weekend. Parties are rampant, and the likelihood for more serious shenanigans rises exponentially. Some might question my sanity for wanting such a weekend, but I was really just hoping to do something exciting. I got my wish.
I was on rounds on Friday night (or Saturday morning) with my partner, Rose, and it was a pretty quiet night for the most part. Weekend rounds start at 1:15am, so we were heading steadily toward completion at around 1:50 when we entered our last building. This building is known to be the “crazy” building. It is home to the art/music residential program, which seems to attract some wild folks. So we went into the building, and it was actually pretty quiet. It seemed that most people were still out on the town. The only thing we encountered was a collection of pumpkins in the hallway, which are not allowed outside resident rooms since they are against fire code and are easily smashed into gooey messes. Yes, being an RA does mean being a fun killer at times unfortunately. So we gathered up the pumpkins once we finished going through the building, and exited the building to take them to the staff office for safekeeping in case someone wanted to claim them. As we exited the building though, the night took a turn. A couple of residents ran up to us from across the courtyard and said they needed help with a girl they thought might have alcohol poisoning. Finally.
So we put down the pumpkins, and walked quickly across the courtyard to find a group of people huddled around a person on the ground by the street. The group of ten or so bystanders cleared as we walked up, and we saw on the ground a rather large girl in a costume that might have been less revealing before she'd lost her mind (but probably not). The good news was that she was conscious, although she was not coherent. She couldn't answer questions, and she had no physical coordination whatsoever. She could just lay there wailing. She was able to recognize that we were RAs, which she was not happy about. She began crying, “No! RAs! Don't tell them! Don't tell them anything!” At varying intervals she would also wail, “I'm so irresponsible!”.
The people around weren't able to give us much information except for her first name. I called the paramedics while my partner collected ID information from the bystanders. The girl's roommate showed up and was able to identify her for us right before the paramedics arrived. We gave them what information we had, and I took notes on what the other bystanders told them (it seems people are much more willing to share information with non-RA authorities). The story was that the girl had been at a frat party and had consumed between eight and ten drinks within a few hours, which is not a recipe for a good night. They decided she needed to be hospitalized, so I called in the situation to my boss.
“Hey Landon, it's JD.” A Resident Community Assistant in another building. “Me and Juan are sitting over here in our building, and there's a room down the hall with some pretty loud music and shouting, and we heard some people inside shouting, 'you almost made it!' We thought you might want to check it out.” Interesting.
We dropped our report and headed over to the building. As soon as we entered the hallway, we heard the loud subwoofers coming from down the hall. We approached the room it was coming from and began to hear voices. We knocked and waited. Thirty seconds went by with no reaction, so we figured they must not have heard us. We knocked again, louder this time. A few seconds later, the door opened.
Inside, there were two girls sitting down on the left side of the room, a guy standing at the door, and a guy on the opposite side of the room dancing against a girl who had undone all but a single button on her shirt. What we saw first, however, was a large table in the center of the room with red cups set up in two opposing triangles filled with beer. If you're not familiar, this is the set up for the now-ubiquitous game “Beer Pong”. They had cleared all their furniture out of the room to make room for the table. We had to ask them to turn off the music, and it took them half a minute to do so. Once the music was off and we had their attention, we informed them that we had come because of the noise, but that alcohol was also a serious violation of Student Housing policy. We asked for their Ids, and miraculously they had somehow managed to not have their IDs on them. Shucks, what a shame. We asked if any of them lived in the room, and lo and behold, they were all visitors, and none of them lived in the room! Funny how that works. Supposedly their host had left a mere five minutes earlier, and they didn't know when he'd be back. We asked their names, and they each gave us a name and school they attended. Their giggling during this process pretty much gave away that all their information was fake, but there was nothing we could do. We asked if they were 21, and you can guess their answer. Of course they were. They had no ID to prove this, so we had them dump out all the alcohol in the bathroom sink. We then escorted them out of the building since they had no host, and that was it.
We went back to my room to finish the last report, and then do the new one, and by the time we were done, it was 4:10 in the morning. I certainly got what I was hoping for, and when I woke up at noon the next day, I was tired, but was also happy that I got through the night with some memorable experiences in tow.
So that was Friday night. Saturday wasn't quite as thrilling (we only had one group of kids with alcohol to deal with), but I was just fine with that. One night of havoc was enough. I'm sure I'll have some more though.
Other than that, it's been just a matter of pressing on through. Hopefully I'll be able to post a little more frequently as the year moves on. We'll see.