As some of you may have heard, it was a rather interesting weekend for me here at Harding. Saturday evening as I sat at dinner with my roommates in Little Rock, I received a phone call. Generally I like phone calls. It's nice to hear from family or friends, but this was not one of those phone calls. It was a fellow RA from my dorm informing me that the sprinklers had gone off in the dorm and that my apartment was flooded. We quickly paid for our meal and drove back to school not knowing how bad things were. We arrived to find several inches of water on our bathroom floor. All of the carpeted areas had apparently absorbed the water and allowed it to pass through to the two floors below us (I think the large hole in our kitchen floor helped with that also). All in all 6 apartments were flooded and the 24 residents of these apartments were forced to move to other available rooms (more on this later).
Now you may be wondering what happened? How did the sprinklers accidentally go off? Well, let's see.....Some "genius" girl got the "brilliant" idea to hang a clotheshanger on the sprinkler head in her room ("Like I totally thought that they were like totally to hang stuff on!") . She jerked the hanger off and it broke the sensor setting off the sprinkler. When the sprinkler goes off it automatically sets off the fire alarm so the entire building had to evacuate. It was 30-45 minutes before people were able to come back into the building and get the water shut off (I'm not exactly sure why it took that long.) So essentially 165 lbs of water pressure was rushing out of the sprinkler for at least 30 minutes. At one point there was approximatly 5 inches of standing water on the third floor. The ceiling tiles of the floors below us caved in. Thousands of dollars of damage was done. Thankfully no one was hurt (not exactly sure how we would have gotten hurt, maybe drowning....I have no idea). My suite was really blessed because nothing major was damaged, but some people lost their computers, tv's, microwaves, and all sorts of personal items which are even harder to replace. I've tried to feel bad for the girl who caused this mess, but I can't help but be mad at her for not thinking at all. I know she didn't plan to do this, but it doesn't change the fact that it was in fact her fault. The least she could do would be to apologize for it. Ironically her name is Katrina and some students have started refering to her as "Hurricane Katrina." I know that's probably harsh, but it makes us feel better.
Now let's go back to the topic of the available rooms. Generally their aren't a lot of extra beds just waiting to be occupied by flood victims. There is only one dorm on campus that ever really has open rooms, Stephens. There is a reason it has open rooms, mostly because it resembles the psych ward of a prison hospital. This is the dorm I lived in my freshman year. As a matter of fact i'm living in the exact same room that I lived in freshman year( For some reason it seemed a lot cooler back then too.) This wasn't exactly the kind of "homecoming" one looks forward to.
We get to move back in in a week. Until then it's eating out or meals in the caf. and forcing myself to do my homework in this unadorned, unstimulating cinderblock cell called a freshman dorm room.
The upside to all of this is Harding is giving each of us a $150 compensation for meals. I have 35 meals in the cafe that I would never use so I figure I'll use them up and keep the money.
How much is an IPod, again?
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2 comments:
Forget the IPOD! $150 is a month's school loan payment!
That may very well be true, but it doesn't sound nearly as frivilous as an IPod. What about an XBox? Logan and I are tired of sharing. Or shoes....that's some nice shoes:)
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