I couldn't breeze over the audience-in-my-flat story without mentioning the door.
And now I think the time has come for the story to be told.
I believe we may well be beyond the powers of the university residential services board now...all the people involved have their degrees safely framed and in full public view. There might not be a statute of limitation on such matters, but I think we may well be past it now, some four and a half years later...
There was a fine young fellow in our flat who we called Jean. That was not his real name. Nonetheless, it was what we called him.
Now Jean had a bit of a temper on him...nothing serious, but he didn't like bureaucracy, and there was a lot of it about.
One day Jean came through the kitchen of the flat, lost his temper and lashed out. His foot hit the bottom of a cupboard door - a cupboard door only slightly less wide than a proper person-door, and just as tall. His foot went through the ply and made a small hole.
Jean, compunding his frustration at the overbearing bureaucracy of the University, was charged £50 for vandalism and the cost of a replacement door...which failed to materialise. We struggled on with a sub-standard door for nearly the entire university year.
Until that fateful night.
That fateful, fateful night.
Returning from the Union one evening, the entire flat, all 12 of us, were knocking about the kitchen and the lounge. Now, I dont' want to paint an unpleasant picture of Jean, but it had been nearly a full academic year since he kicked the door, and so the times between his fitful rages were quite long. And he was a really good bloke.
But he was annoyed again.
And this time, he figured, he'd already paid for a replacement door, so the old one...well...he could do what he liked with it. So he punched it. At about chest height.
"What the hell did you do that for?"
"Well, it's my sodding door. I paid for it."
"Oh."
(pause as everyone in the flat leans over)
"Can we have a go?"
First punches, a few kicks...then one of the girls got her knives out and began stabbing it á lá Psycho...so everyone did. A hole formed at kicking height, about the size of a dustbin lid. Jean produced a hard hat. Ronnie put it on, and while someone held the door open, charged head first across the kitchen into the door. At the end of the orgy of destruction, there were two enormous holes in the door.
Which was handy, as you didn't actually have to open the door if you wanted a saucepan.
The next morning, we put posters over the holes and waited for the repairman to come with a chit that said 'Replace - one damaged door'.
Only he never came...and we realised that we would move out, the University would find the door, and there would be A Principle to uphold - that of not encouraging wilful damage of fixtures and fittings...or wanton vandalism, as it is more often called.
Another bit of background - after year of...entertainment, forged letters, shopping trolleys in the shower, disco lights on the lawn, parties, toast, water fights and the rest, only five of us had warnings left on the 'Three Strikes And You're Out' rule. Just one each.
The door was a damning piece of evidence of our guilt.
It had to go.
The situation was this; we had to dispose of the door...get shot of it. However, being the campus paradise that it was, Warwick had a top-notch CCTV network, so just wandering outside with the door wasn't an option. Not even at night. Security would get curious.
The door had to leave the flat in a form not recognisable to the security guards.
Second problem: How did it go missing?
We needed a story...something believable.
We decided, in a flat-wide forum, to finish the work we had begun. The door was taken off its hinges, and taken quietly into my room, which had the floor covered in newspaper in preparation. In the corner were two large sport holdalls. We broke the strong wooden frame as slowly and as quietly as possible. They broke in half with difficulty. The chips of painted ply sprayed everywhere. After thirty minutes' work, the bags were full.
Of door.
The story went like this: Drunk (obviously) two of our number had removed the door and placed it upstairs as a prank. Sensibly, two hard-working girls had identified it as a fire hazard and placed it outside. In the morning it had gone.
We would just have to hope that Estate Management wouldn't check with Security.
There were fines dished out...ostensibly to pay for the hinges.
The door itself was taken nonchalantly out of the flat to Jean's car in the dead of night; one holdall was dumped in nearby woodland, and the other was hurled onto the back of a goods train heading for Birmingham.
I never knew you had such a good criminal mind.
I'll remember when I need to dispose of a body or some such.
that is a great story..!
because i went to uni in my own city, i never lived in a residential hall.
clearly, i missed out.
i love his evil mind.
>but he didn't like beaurocracy
OR spelling it
Man, what a sucky uni
For a while in our "college" (residential only, no suggestion of study, beyond that required to get a jug down in 4-5seconds (we had a chap who could...) ) we got into the habit of kicking each other's doors in for the hell of it.
there were a few punchings-of-holes-through-doors early in the piece but that was deemed to be too annoying because you were left with a hole. not a lot of privacy. whereas you could still lean a dud door back up against your doorframe and achieve privacy. ideally with a post-it note on the outside with "fuck off you bastards" on it for clarity
it is frighteningly easy to go through a door, btw. as/when you buy a house, don't even consider getting a front door with a wooden frame. the work of a moment, and, with practice, if you're walking up, you don't even need to break stride.
except for this one door
it was a HARD door. it was the MAN.
people bouncing off it for about half an hour. finally thingummy the pyromaniac card player (damn, can't remember his name. can remember his car keys in the pot, and losing Guts twice on an ace-ace hand in one night then again on an ace-king hand with no more aces, and seeing his "hur hur"ing face suddenly masked by the sheet of flame leaping up from the table between us. but not his name. bugger) gave it his all, and after bruising most of his body finally did the deed. Except the whole bloody jamb tore out of the wall and just toppled forwards thumpBANG onto the chap's fridge in a neat rotation with thingummy flailing for balance and sliding down the angled door back the way he came, followed by bits of brick dust and paint.
ohhh... those were the days.
i wish i'd been taking notes, i'm sure there were more of them
Pete? his name might have been pete.
and his car was VB
not the beer, victorian bitter.
vicious bastard.
i think it was pete. there's lingerings of S or Z following shortly after it... ZZZZno it's not coming to me. but then, neither is clarity. so what am i doing recording these foamings for undeleteable posteriority??? THIS post ends HE
Wow, you got much more out of your dorm experience than I did. Of course, all the American dorms I've seen have been made of concrete blocks and steel. More durable, less fun.
Did you know that the esteemed and elegant Dr Pockless was also an alumni of the great establishment of which you write, Stuart?
I remember a student 'night out' culminating near a quiet pub near the train lines. We got chucked out at closing and a few of us thought it would be fun to race the train that had just lumbered (slowly) along the tracks.
We jumped the (unsafely) low fence and started running alongside the train. Next thing I know, one of my mates had grabbed hold of a rail and swung himself up onto a ledge - it was a freight train of some description.
It was all very 'movie' like, and we all did the same, laughing, breathless we clung on for a while.
Then the train started to pick up speed. Soon it was going to fast to jump off. We all clambered into one of the containers figuring, well it's gotta stop somewhere.. we were still drunk enough to not really care.
Next thing I know some bastard has thrown a bag full of wood into the container - caught me full in the face. Bastards.