Radio - My College Days

I thought about one of the strangest things that happened while I was in college. This was many years ago, but I still remember it vividly. This story happened many years before I embraced Kindness; I was young and headstrong.

I was assigned a roommate in the dorm from a random pool. This was supposed to be a means of exposing us to people from different areas and backgrounds. As with any unexpected situation, things don’t always work out.

The first few weeks were a never-ending string of minor conflicts and attempts at compromise. I think we both worked at improving things, but there was one disturbing habit that my roommate had I could not stand. He would wake up early for his classes. No problem, except he would always hit the snooze button on his clock radio instead of shutting the alarm off and then showering.

So I wake up earlier every weekday than needed with his clock radio playing NPR. I asked him repeatedly to take care and shut the alarm off. He kept saying he would but never seemed to get around to it. By this point, we were getting on each other’s nerves, and it was clear that a showdown was coming.

The last straw came on a weekend when my roommate went home. His alarm clock went off on Saturday morning! This had never happened before, but I remembered that we had another argument about his lack of consideration the day before.

I had had enough of his behavior. Since he wasn’t there to feel my wrath, I took out my frustration on the next best thing, his clock radio. I unplugged the clock radio on that rainy Saturday morning to stop the noise. Then I went to my desk and wrote down a heartfelt suicide note and attached it to his clock radio, stating that it couldn’t go on any longer being owned by a prick like him and therefore decided to end it all.

I cut the cord to remove the prongs, tied a knot at the end of the cord and then opened the window and lowered the clock radio out, and shut the window on the knot in the cord. I attached the suicide note to the line at the knot.

Because the window in our dorm faced the front of the building, anyone who glanced upward saw a clock radio hanging from a window. Several people asked about it, and I said I was surprised because the clock radio never seemed depressed or suicidal.

My roommate arrived Sunday night and was surprised by his clock radio suicide. When he threatened to “kick my ass,” I invited him to try at any time because I was tired of him and his sh!t. He told me I had to replace his clock radio, and I referred him to the “ass-kicking” threat he had made earlier.

By Tuesday, he was assigned to another room. It turns out he had a habit of tormenting every other roommate. I was glad to be rid of him. My life improved dramatically after we were separated, and he became someone else’s nightmare.