Bad plumping, leaks, frosh—annex this, Berkeley

We knew from the start that we'd be annexed. That was okay. I mean, Durfee is pretty nice. Durfee is, of course, the place we assumed we were going. Since my class has been annexed not one, but two years in a row, we made the foolish mistake of assuming that somebody somewhere gave a shit. We were soon to find out otherwise.

Dean Winnie dropped the bomb—we were going to live out our junior year in the black hole of Vanderbilt—sometime after it had become at all possible to find off campus housing. We were outraged. "Oh!" cried our Dean with delight, "but there are skylights!" Like that made any difference to 20 seriously pissed off girls who had just discovered they'd be living across Old Campus, up five flights of stairs, in a building that should have been razed at least 20 years ago.

It's not like my little sister and I didn't enjoy the aerobic benefits of lugging furniture bigger than both of us put together up five steep flights of stairs. But I got a little upset when I turned on the sink in an attempt to wash my sweaty face and the handle came off in my hand. And it's not like I don't love having a roommate for the third year in a row. We can use each other to huddle for warmth because our heater doesn't work. But then, the rains came. We opened our door to find a gushing river coursing its way down the stairs from the sixth floor. It was also raining inside the stairway, an odd mixture of dirty water and pieces of the roof. Then the hallway lights started to flicker and I felt like we'd stumbled into a creepy horror movie.

Because we live so far away and so high up, no one ever comes to visit us except for the physical plant workers, who play cruel mind games with us involving breaking whatever they've been sent to fix, plus whatever else seems to be indispensable to us. They travel in packs of five and apparently only work promptly at 8:30 in the morning. And as for the skylights? Skylight is a euphemism for "Fake window that sucks." One of my suitemates' skylight was so broken that it took three of us, biceps bulging, to open and shut it. I have two, and the physical plant would play a fun game where they'd alternately fix one and break the other, depending on the day of the week.

Furthermore, our Dean "forgot" to mention that our skylights are manufactured by some random company in Germany, which has since gone out of business. Could we perhaps get our broken skylights fixed? Nein. Despite all this, I decided to make the best of it. Leaning out my skylight, gazing at the beautiful panorama of Chapel Street, I thought that maybe it wasn't so bad. And then one of my especially mature freshman neighbors, who like to scamper around on the roof, threw a water balloon at my head. Rebecca Friedman is a junior in Berkeley.

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