I mean…really?

Last? week, on one of the days (I’m guessing a Tuesday but I’m not sure and it’s not important), there was a fire drill in my dorm, McBain Hall. 

I didn’t have a morning class that day, so I had slept in a little bit and gotten up around 10:30 to take a shower. Showering in McBain can be a bit inconvenient depending on the time of day because there are only seven bathrooms per floor of 50-60 people; sometimes a larger number of people want to shower all around the same time, so there’s competition. Furthering this problem, McBain bathrooms have limited ventilation, so it’s really not fun to try to shower immediately after somebody.

Anyways, I went into an open bathroom and started taking a shower. As I was taking the shampoo down, the fire alarm went off. This put me in a conundrum: should I leave mid-shower to exit the building, or continue showering and ignore it. On the one hand, there had been a real fire in another dorm recently, so I definitely felt like it could be a real fire. However, I also knew that it could be a drill. Should I keep showering and risk death or a housing code violation? There was lots of water around me, maybe I would be okay. If I did leave, what should I do? Hurry down the stairs soaking wet wearing only a towel? Rush back to my dorm (maybe risky) to put on pants, which would become wet? The alarm was in the bathroom and it was loud, so I ended up deciding to leave. I left my shower stuff in the bathroom and ran back to my room to dry off a little and throw on a hoodie and sweatpants, before briskly walking down the stairs towards the back of the pack of students.

Once on the street, we were congratulated on our good performance in the fire drill. I was pissed. Luckily, I had been standing right outside of the building doors, so I was excellently positioned to get back into the building first. However, upon reaching the fifth floor and almost instantaneously getting rid of my clothes and donning my towel, I discovered that somebody had occupied my bathroom, despite the presence of my stuff. All of the other stalls were open, as everybody was still getting back from the fire drill, leaving only one conclusion: somebody skipped the fire drill to take my shower.

I stood outside the stall for 5 minutes angry as hell and tried to glare at them as they left, but they went the opposite way so I never caught their face. By that point, all the other showers had filled, so I had no option but to enter the damp air and shower again from the top.

Listen stranger, neighbor, thief. What the hell? If you want to skip the fire drill, I guess that’s your business, not mine. And I have to respect the strategy for getting your choice of bathrooms. But they were all empty. Clearly, you must have noticed my array of all-natural hair care products and recognized that the shower had been occupied prior to the fire alarm. Why not just go into the neighboring bathroom?

Count yourself lucky that I didn’t see your face.

shower droplets via Max Pixel