My Fourth Floor Adventure

It occurs to me that I should specify that this is not a dream.


I was hanging about the laundry room, waiting for my roommate Tina's laundry to come out of the washer. She had had to leave, perhaps to work or go to the library, and left me a note asking if I could please put her laundry in the washer as soon as one was free.

I had been asleep. After staying up for a day and change, I was becoming tired and had decided to take a nap. It lasted from 2:30 to 7:00. At seven, my friend Gabriel and several of his friends arrived from Medford, asked me to lead them to a Chinese restaurant, and then went off to a concert. I had soup and half an order of sweet and sour pork and accounted it a nice, if light, supper/breakfast.

Odd that there is no brunchlike word for a meal eaten so late you can't tell if it's supper or breakfast. Perhaps these decadents aren't the ones catered to by brunch cafés. Unaffected by the morals of a God-fearing, early retiring society, they don't care whether the combo they eat at Denny's represents a late supper or an early breakfast, or something between the two.

Anyway, I was feeling refreshed and figured it would be good, karma-wise, to do Tina's laundry. Automatic washers make the whole thing a very minor hassle these days, anyway.

While waiting for the laundry to finish, I unplugged the tiny dorm refrigerator, unloaded the several food items (being sure to put the perishable ones in the middle of the pile) and started chipping away at the ice attaching itself to the freezer compartment.

Having learned from previous mistakes, I now knew what to do. I filled several plastic bags with hot water and put them in the small freezer shelf. As they worked on the ice inside, they also loosened the ice on the outside of the box. I then took my large knife

(This reminds me of a text-based game I played once, "Dracula in London." One of the objects people could have was a Large Knife. There were enough for everyone, as opposed to the wafers or the garlic, which only one character could have.)

and chipped away at a corner of the ice until I exposed some of the metal. I then used the knife as a lever and pried the ice sheet off.

It quit the metal shelf with a satisfying THUNK. I had removed nearly all the ice, with only a few minutes' work. I brushed the remaining bits of ice out of the freezer, dried the inside of the refrigerator, and replaced the food. I plugged it in and it started humming again.

My timer dinged, and I went to the laundry room to empty the washer, but I had mis-timed it. I had several minutes to kill.

I had already emptied the dryers and neatly folded the strangers' clothes in them, setting them on the counter by the microwave. The other washer beeped, and I took those clothes out and put them in one of the dryers.

I talked to the people in the lounge for a while. I persuaded them to take my sugar-free cocoa and my two Equal tablet dispensers, as I had developed the notion that Nutrasweet was trying to kill me.

"I don't plan your demise," I assured them, "I simply believe you to have fewer food neuroses than myself."

The RA from the fourth floor suddenly burst through the doors from the stairs. He informed us that the fourth floor's pizza and ice cream party was on its last legs, and that they had enormous amounts of ice cream and pizza getting warm and cold, respectively. I still felt somewhat hungry, so I went down to investigate.

The fifth floor is not a terribly social floor. It was nice to see a dozen or so people in the fourth floor lounge, conversing and eating.

They seemed happy. There were six boxes of pizza, labeled in marker. Many only had a slice or two left, so I condensed the pizza into two boxes, one vegetarian/cheese and the other one with all the pepperoni.

I had two slices of pepperoni. The pizza was nice. It wasn't from the campus pizza shop (which is rather good despite the fact they have a captive audience, being included on the standard meal plan and all), and the sauce tasted better. They skimped on the cheese, though.

The ice cream table was a disaster. The little coffee table from the lounge was covered in empty or near-empty ice cream containers, cylindrical and rectangular, as well as jars of hot toppings. There was something sticky covering every square inch.

Unnoticed by the people who lived on that floor (perhaps, like the Borg, they ignored intruders until they did something threatening) I started throwing away used paper plates and empty ice cream containers. I must confess I helped empty a few, particularly one with a few spoons full of cookies and cream at the bottom.

Having cleared the table of trash, I went into the laundry room and wet a rag. I returned and washed off the table, then the outsides of the ice cream containers. A couple looked leaky, so I grabbed some plastic bags and nestled them inside. Under the table lurked many plastic bags (from the ice cream's purchase, no doubt) and wrappers. I bagged all the ice cream to prevent drips and threw away the rest of the plastic.

Having done this cleaning, all that remained on the table were four half-eaten but enormous ice cream containers, the bowls and spoons, and the toppings. One was a cylinder of some chocolate variant and the other three were chocolate, rainbow sherbet, and Neapolitan. The RA then pulled himself out of his ice cream stupor and said,

"WOW! You're CLEANING?"

"Well, I was. I'm sort of done now."

"Wow. I wish my residents would just clean stuff. You can take any of that ice cream, if you want."

I took some Neapolitan ice cream. It was the only container used enough that I could cut the empty part of the box off and shove the rest in the tiny freezer compartment of my fridge. Besides, I didn't know Tina's ice cream preferences and Neapolitan seemed a safe bet.

By this time Tina's clothes were out of the washer, and I stuck them in the dryer. The other dryer load was done, so I folded those, too.

I returned to my room. My neighbor at this time was a very loud, angry and evil girl who happened to share my first name, variant pronunciation and all. Her boyfriend, with whom I was on better terms, was closing her door.

"Hey, Dan! Have you been to the fourth floor?"

He looked momentarily startled, then his expression soured.

"Why? What happened?"

Duh. I had forgotten that the fourth floor is the unofficial gay floor. There had been arguments about making an official gay floor, but once the paper had said, "?an unofficial pride hall exists on the fourth floor of Carson?" there had been a rash of vandalism.

"Oh, no. They had a party and they're trying to get rid of a lot of extra ice cream and pizza." He thanked me briefly and went in to tell his girlfriend. I went into my room and wrote some stuff.

Tina came back from work. Or the library. I'm still not sure.

"Your laundry is in the dryer," I informed her, "and there's ice cream in the freezer if you want some. The fourth floor has a lot of ice cream and pizza they're trying to get rid of." She was sorry she'd already eaten. She then wandered off to use a neighbor's computer.

I wrote more stuff, then went and checked on her clothing. It was dry, and another washer had finished. I took out and folded her clothes, as well as the other dryer's clothes, then moved the wet clothes into the dryer. As I walked back to the room with Tina's clothing, Dan was again leaving Anna-next-door.

"Oh, Anna?" I don't respond to my name as well as I used to, having lived with and next to two other Annas for most of a year. I looked up, "Mm?"

"Thanks for telling us about the food." Whoa. That was a little too sincere. I got the vibe that he was about to tell me about Jesus. Maybe they hadn't eaten in a while. I muttered something like "don't even mention it," and returned to my room.

I wrote some more stuff, then decided to mend Tina's nightgown. It was a really nice one, I think from India, but there were a couple of tears along the sleeves' seams. I have a lot of spools of different-colored thread and a little sewing kit, so I decided to sew them up.

As I was sewing her nightgown up, I was also reading Usenet groups and listening to the Talking Heads' album Fear of Music. (It's a nice album. I had just bought it the day before. I really like "I Zimbra.") I didn't notice that she had returned to the room to get some more of her books and notecards.

I looked up, feeling sheepish.

"Um, hi. Just thought I'd sew up these holes. While I was doing the laundry."

I guess I was worried she'd think I was some kind of housework-doing pervert or something. She already talks about how I do the recycling and vacuum (whenever it needs to be done and weekly, respectively).

"Holes. In the arms."

"Oh, THANK YOU!!!"

Folks, I wouldn't have used so many screamers if that weren't how she sounded. I made some more don't-even-mention-it noises, and she eventually gathered her books and wandered off again, with a bit of a spring in her step.

I finished sewing the holes, reinforced some likely holes-to-be, and wrote some more of my research paper. When I went to make some popcorn in the laundry room (my popper's loud, and I didn't want to bother other residents in my wing), someone had written the following on the chalkboard:

THE LAUNDRY FOLDER KICKS 100K ASS!

I don't know what that means, but I was sure tickled. It's nice to do chores for people, now and then, and it's nice to be having a crappy day and suddenly find your laundry folded and your socks collated. I got my Slack, and other people got theirs through me. It was a nice night.