Living in a quad is what happens after getting a text that reads “Hey, I’m one of your roommates for this year!” and all you can focus on are the words “one of.” It’s composing yourself after reading said text and throwing away every idea you had of having that one BFF roommate freshman year, because the girl who just texted you is one of your roommates, not your one roommate. It’s meeting three strangers on move-in day between boxes and nervous hugs and realizing you will be waking up to each other’s blaring iPhone alarm clocks every morning for a year. It’s breaking the ice with the aid of a trunk full of Burnett’s and for the first two weeks, it’s a summer camp feeling you can’t shake. It’s Hammerman 306.
Hammerman 306 is a magical place, a room that may as well be four rooms in one. This is not to say that the room is large—in fact, the opposite is true. Hammerman 306 is (or, was) what’s called a forced quad: a room that shouldn’t really house four people, but Megan Rowe says it should so it should and it does and its inhabitants get 25 percent off of housing in return for breathing down the necks of three roommates instead of one.
In Hammerman 306, having a bed on the ground is a rare luxury—but it comes with a price. Surrounded by lofted beds raised to the height of a top bunk bed, the single “normal” bed boasts many alter egos. It is a table for meals, card games, and homework. It is the honorary communal couch. It is a black hole that will suck up a vast number of items, from socks to pencils to school IDs alike. It’s a theater with a stunning view of roommates who fall off their lofted beds.
The inhabitants of Hammerman 306 know that a kitchen is a vital part of any living space. So vital, that it can take the makeshift form of a desk piled with two mini fridges on top of one another, its drawers storing a super market aisle’s worth of snacks. It’s complete with a coffee corner consisting of a Keurig plugged into a small desk lamp. Sleepy members of this room are used to the EEEEEEEEEEEEEEHHHH *click* of the coffee maker when every morning whoever stumbles out of bed first makes coffee in the dark via the light of her phone flashlight.
Hammerman 306 is the forever unobtainable “feng shui.” It’s coming home from a concert at 2 a.m. and deciding that if we move the dresser here, and two of the four desks here, we will have more room for activity. It’s deciding your mattress looks better on the floor than it did on the loft and it’s making a cozy cave for yourself under the protection of the wooden loft where now, the trunk sits, not your bed.
It’s folding clean laundry on your desk. It’s when one person comes over and it’s officially a fire hazard. It’s the uneasy look on the tour guide’s face as he explains, “they’re not all like this…”
It’s knowing that once you order Chinese, the aroma of pork fried rice and wontons will haunt the room for at least 48 hours. It can be sniffed out from down the hall, as smells tend to linger in dorm rooms the size of the boxes you eat from. It’s sitting on pillows on the floor to eat, and it’s swapping egg rolls for stories.
It’s waking everyone up from your snoring when you’re ridiculously congested and it’s buying everyone earplugs to apologize. It’s watching a video of your own snoring that your roommates so lovingly recorded.
It’s wine corks that get stuck in bottles and the pliers it takes to remove them—and the laughter that comes with it. It’s differentiating between normal nights and “sleepover” nights, because although every night we slept in the same room, it was not every night we talked until dawn in the fashion of a little girl’s first slumber party. It’s realizing, on one of those nights, that it’s OK you didn’t have just one roommate after all.
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