Universal Remote
Out of curiosity one day, a friend of mine decided to find out whether his own tv remote would work on the large screen t.v. in the dorm's lounge/rec room. Sure enough, it did, and from quite a distance, too. So he would enjoy walking innnocently past the lounge whenever there was a broadcast of vital importance on, such as the Superbowl or a Star Trek episode involving the Borg, and surreptitiously changing the channel. People got *very* upset, but never suspected what was happening.
Claven
The roommate of the friend mentioned above was a subject of constant torment. He had apparently been a big fish in the small pond of his high school, or had fancied himself such, and was constantly telling grandiose tales of leaping out of buildings, getting shot, fathering a number of children that seemed to grow by the week, and various other dubious exploits. So his permanent nickname became "Claven", after Cliff Claven, the windbag mailman in Cheers, and eventually many people knew him only as "Claven." Guys on the floor would call in pledges for him whenever there was a telethon on t.v., and he'd get envelopes from Jerry addressed to "Claven." One time when he had passed out after consuming a staggering amount of vodka, some of the guys decided to leave messages on his face with a permanent marker. I don't remember just what they wrote, but his face was *very* red by the time he managed to scrub it off. (Another fellow in similar circumstances had one eyebrow shaved off). One evening I stepped into the hall from my room on the fifth floor, and found it filled with smoke. Wondering where it was coming from, I followed its increasing density down the stairwell to "Claven's" room, on the second floor. His roommate and some friends had smoked several *boxes* of cigars, enough to fill half of our wing of the dorm with smoke dense enough to restrict visiblity in places to ten feet, and had apparently exhaled every breath through the clothes that "Claven" had left hanging in his room. I think the decision to do this was motivated in part by their having consumed all of his beer in the fridge.
Naughty Bits
One poster mentioned hiding porno pictures in someone's belongings, and this happened on my floor too, but on an epic scale. Several of the guys on the floor were needling a very conservative fellow who was uncomfortable about anything related to sex. One night while he was gone, they chopped up a stack of porno magazines into more than a *hundred* small explicit pictures, and hid them in his things. The word "hid" hardly does the event justice...they stuck them in his clothes, stuffed them in obscure pages in every one of his books, unscrewed his flashlight and wrapped them around the batteries, even disassembled some of his appliances and installed pictures inside them! I don't think he ever found them all, they were still turning up *years* later.
Culinary Artisans
Everyone's occasionally played with their food, especially in dorms. We made some impressive creations. Tater-tot and toothpick animals, hundred substance sundaes, nearly every combination was tried. My roommate enjoyed taking an orange and stuffing it into his glass; removal was impossible. If we knew the person working on the dish line, we'd write loving messages in ketchup on our plates. There was one fellow who took a full bowl of ketchup, and covered the entire surface of his tray. It was a spectacular mess, and he thought it was hilarious, until he found out he'd left his picture i.d. on the tray under all that ketchup. I gather he had a long talk with the hall manager.
Some Swedish Humor
My roommate and one our friends had been working together on some projects for their civil engineering classes, and my roommate knew his account password. So one night when the fellow was logged in on a slow terminal at the dorm (about 1200 baud), we logged on too, and enjoyed killing the occasional process to cause confusion. Once he'd noticed we where there, we cat'ed a 200k file of jokes written entirely in Swedish onto his screen (cat swedish.jokes > /dev/tty?? ). 200k takes a while to scroll up the screen at 1200 baud, and it doesn't add to the enjoyment if you can't read Swedish. My roommate also changed his prompt to something so embarrassing I won't repeat it here. The fellow was a Unix newbie, and wasn't aware of the "set prompt" command, and did his computer projects in private for a month for fear someone would see his screen.
Head and Shoulders and...
The same roommate, in our feud with "Smokey" from across the hall, at one point took a leak in the fellow's shampoo bottle while he was away (a very definite low point in this particular relationship). I'm not certain if or how many times "Smokey" used the shampoo, but I did spot him in the hall one afternoon, pouring the bottle into a tray in the hall, and exclaiming, "There's something *yellow* in it!"
Bang a Gong
My roommate and I my freshman year were, essentially, jackasses, and enjoyed finding new ways to make annoying noises. Our loft became a particularly expressive percussion instrument. This loft had been used at least once before and apparently dissambled in haste by Storm Giants, for by the time we installed it, it basically consisted of random sized lumber and an inadequate number of bent bolts. Thus it wasn't a particularly stable structure, and only a large amount of newspaper shoved between it and the wall prevented its collapse. Despite this, if we rocked in sync, we could treat our neighbors to the opening of the 2001 Space Odyssey soundtrack...*BOMP* Bomp *BOMP* Bomp *BOMP* bomp *BOMP* bomp. This, however, would generally knock down his Saudi sword and pair of katanas; it was thus fortunate that we'd be in the loft, but the latter items usually hit my keyboard and sent keycaps flying in random directions. I never did find my down arrow that year. (Our other noteworthy piece of furniture was a semi-functional recliner chair my roommate had found by the side of the road while returning to campus one weekend.) We also enjoyed whiling away the evenings in bed with about $1.27 in pennies, dropping them...one...by...one...onto the floor below. We heard through the grapevine our neighbors below didn't exactly relish this practice, nor the bucket of six dozen superballs we'd occasionally hurl, nor the mysterious substances that appeared on their window.
Pop Go the Weasels
Most people have probably seen those little noise makers, sometimes called Bang-Snaps, that consist of a small teardrop shaped wad of tissue paper containing gravel coated with some volatile mixture. When thrown or squeezed, they explode with a loud snap. My roommate and I went through a few phases of playing with these. We enjoyed, among other things, balancing them on door handles in libraries and other quiet places. Some nights when the room was full of bored people, we'd take some to the window, and toss them just behind people going up the sidewalk, and watch the reaction. We were never quite able to make pizza delivery men drop their boxes (fortunately). Other residents above us, however, had taken a vehement dislike to the fact that someone routinely parked their moped in front of the dorm, chained to the railing where people needed to walk. Every evening for several weeks after dinner, they would hurl ice cream cones down at the offending moped, and we would be alerted to the excitement by white streaks flying past our window. There would usually be a Gaussian distribution of splat marks around the moped, but finally one night they hit it square on the seat. I never saw it parked there again.