I'm sure most people who have lived in a college dorm can tell you some crazy things about dorm life. Between crazy roommates and 3 a.m. fire alarms, living on-campus can generate some entertaining stories. But what if you had to live with one of your worst fears? In fall 2013, I had to do just that.
My second year of college started in August 2013. I lived on my sorority floor and had the privilege of sharing the senior suite. This room is the last one in the hall, making it closest to the outdoor stairwell. One evening I'm doing whatever it is sophomores do, when all of a sudden I'm screaming and jumping off my lofted bed. A large, intimidating bee had just flown into the room, hovering near the central light. My lofted bed put me right beside it. After I screamed and caused a commotion in the hallway, the bee was killed and life went on.
Despite being petrified of bees, this event did not concern me too much at first. It was still warm weather, so we had our windows open. Having a bee fly in the room wasn't anything out of the norm.
Cut to the next day. I'm getting ready for our weekly chapter meeting when another bee of the same huge size flies into the room. In a similar fashion to the day before, I cause a scene until its killed. Everyone laughs at me, calls me a baby, and I'm left still shaken as if I had narrowly escaped death. The third day of this nightmare, we start to get more bees coming through the room -- this isn't normal anymore. My suitemates and I talk to the RAs, who were no help. Vigilante style, we begin searching for ways the bees could be infiltrating our homes and killing any intruder on sight. The shower light seemed to be the main weakness we had, so we sealed it with duct tape. Showering in this condition had me ready to streak down the hallway if any bee got through our blockade. Of course, most people did not believe the bee problem could be as bad as we were saying. I mean, I'm irrationally scared of bees, I've been known to attempt jumping out of moving cars to get away from them. So for credibility, I took a picture of our shower light:
Shortly after complaining about the bee infestation on social media, other people told us about their bee problems. We eventually learned there was a giant bees' nest around the sixth floor and the bees were flying to floors above and below it. Being an upstanding university that I attend, they gave us temporary rooms to stay in until the nest was removed, right? Wrong. If we wanted to stay in another room, we would have to completely move out of our own rooms that had already been set up for months. I ended up staying in other people's rooms more than my own. Luckily, I'm in a sorority so I had plenty of sisters to stay with. Sometimes I would try to stay in my own bed, but the whole night I felt as if bees were crawling all over me. At one point, my parents even drove an hour and a half to spray the bees down in my room. After the most traumatizing month of my life, the nest was finally removed.
If your worst dorm room is experience is your roommate leaving her Ramen bowl unwashed until it grows mold, count your blessings. You could be living a waking nightmare.
