POST #800: The Key Story

I felt that I needed to write something good for such a monumental post as this, since it is this blog's 800^th post. The following is essentially a true story. Some of the details may have occurred a bit differently, since we're talking about a single event that happened nearly twenty years ago.

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Back in the fall of 1988, when I was a sophomore in college, I shared a room with G and P in Russell Towers. Our room was the same one I had as a freshman with two other roommates. It was located in C tower, room C303. Russell Towers has three separate sections, for obvious reasons labelled A, B and C tower. All three towers are connected but not all have the same number of floors.

G, P and I met as freshmen at Inter Varsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) the previous year and quickly discovered that we'd become lifelong friends. We share many great memories of that one brief semester when the three of us were living in a room designed for two officially called a "triple" by the college's housing department. That was back before they built "the new dorm" across the quad and there was a serious overcrowding of students and not enough dorm rooms on campus to hold us all.

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It was a holiday weekend and the majority of students decided to go home, rather than stay on campus, including my friend P. I had a job working for the Campus Center and one of my duties was to show the films in the campus movie theater, so I could not go home. Not that I would have anyway, since I was content to try and catch up on stuff that I had to do for my classes and work a few shifts.

Saturday morning of that weekend, G and I decided that, after staying up until 2 or 3 in the morning watching movies that neither one of us would go to DAKA (the company hired to feed the student population) for breakfast in the morning and just get up whenever we felt like it. I suppose it was sometime after 10:00 AM when I climbed down from my perch on the top bunk to go down the hallway to the shower/bathroom. So, sans clothes and just a towel covering myself, I grabbed my toiletry bag and headed off to the shower. G was still sleeping in his bottom bunk.

Couldn't have been more than ten minutes later, I hear a voice in the bathroom calling my name with the distinct sound of a question in the voice. Immersed in a pleasantly hot shower, it took me a minute or two to realize that I was not imagining the voice and that it belonged to my roommate G. The conversation went something like this:

"Ummm..... T, do you have your keys?" was the million dollar question floating in the air before me.

"Huh?", I replied, still savoring the steamy cascade of water flowing over my body.

"Did you bring your keys with you into the bathroom?"

"No, I didn't. I never do."

"Uh-oh."

"Uh-oh, what uh-oh?"

"I didn't bring my keys either and the door shut behind me. We're locked out."

I finished my shower, got out and began to dry myself off. "What, are you serious?" I asked, as light began to dawn on the situation at hand. "Did you say we're locked out of our room?"

"Yup. As soon as the door closed," he said, "I knew. I just knew that my keys were inside."

As I came out into the main section of bathroom, I looked at G and he too was only wrapped in his towel. "Great," I thought. [Well, that's not exactly what I thought... you get the idea.] "You realize that no one is around this weekend, right?"

"Uh-huh. What are we going to do?"

"Well why don't you take your shower and I'll see what I can do."

So G hops in the shower and I, hair all wet and wrapped at the waist in my towel, head down to our room to confirm what I knew to be true. Door locked. Both sets of keys safely in the room. Both of us wrapped in our towels outside the room. "Unbelievable," I think to myself as I head back into the bathroom.

"This is not good," I said to G as he was finishing with his shower and was once again wrapped in his towel. "We need to find an RA. They have keys that open up everything."

Our Resident Assistant, whom I'll call Ed, was one of the students who had gone home for the weekend. He told us that if we ever got locked out of our room to come and find him or another RA and they would let us back in. We went down to the front desk in the lobby to see if anyone was there who could help us. That's where the office was and where the RA's gathered to socialize occasionally. No one was there. Not a soul. What were we going to do now? There was a signboard near the office that had a listing of all of the RA's names and room numbers.

We went back to C tower and decided to walk through the entire building, floor by floor until we could find an RA to help, stopping by the rooms of each RA listed. We hadn't found anyone up until that point. One more name on the list, an RA whose room was on the top level of A tower about as far away from our room as you could possibly get and still be in the same building. Hopefully this person would be in their room and able to help.

When we got to the room, we knocked on the door. Nothing. We knocked again. This time we heard a voice. "Wait a minute...." was the answer. As the door opened...

Now picture this: You're the RA on duty and you decide to sleep in on Saturday morning. You groggily open the door and you see two practically naked guys wrapped in towels standing in front of you, what thoughts would cross your mind?

Well, if you happen to be a male Resident Assistant, you probably burst out laughing and ask right away what the hell happened? If you happen to be one of three female RA's in the building, of which she just happened to be one, you probably have a dumbfounded but slightly amused look on your face.

Believe me, she did.

I'll always wonder what her first impression was seeing G and I like that at her door. I also wonder if she told anyone about this afterwards. I like to remember that the RA was an attractive woman but don't really remember. I do recall that she was not an ugly woman...

Embarrassed as all heck, we quickly explained our situation, that we locked ourselves out of our room, yada, yada, yada. She went back into her room for something (probably her room keys and the office key...) and came back out in about two minutes.

Silently we followed her to the office. She asked us what room we were in again so she could get the right key for our door. We then followed her back to our room (I don't think she wanted to follow us or look at us in our lovely towel attire...) where she unlocked the door. After repeatedly saying thank-you all the way back to the room, I went in first and G followed me. G told me later that just as she was turning around to head back to her room, his towel slipped off and fell to the floor. He's not sure what or how much she saw...

Let me tell you that I have never been so happy to get dressed in my entire life!

The whole ordeal probably lasted an hour or so but it seemed like an eternity.

To this day G and I still laugh about this. P wished he had been there to see it. If he had though, this event probably wouldn't have happened. P always brought his keys with him to the shower.