The life and times of sorority house living

Off-topic
1

Continuing from this post in the ‘Intelligent Design’ thread, I’ll try to recount some of the stories that were borne out of my years as a houseparent living with 46 college sorority girls.

A little background is probably in order first. I separated from the military in April 1986 with the intent of returning to school to finish my engineering degree. As I had taken classes at Northern Illinois University prior to entering the military, it made sense to return to NIU in order not to lose any credits. So Mary and I settled into life in the big rural city of DeKalb Illinois, found full time jobs and began preparations to start school part time in the fall. About a month and a half before the start of school, we were approached by a friend in our church who knew of an open sorority houseparent job and immediately thought that we would be perfect for the position. Long story short, we checked into the job, found it to me a fantastic opportunity for me to take full time classes, so we accepted. Neither Mary or I had ever been involved in Greek life in college so little did we know that we were in for a wild ride for the next four years.

As I mentioned in the Intelligent Design thread, we were responsible for maintenance and repair, supplies, and hiring and firing the busboys, cook and maid. We were NOT thank the Lord responsible for discipline. The house governing sisters took care of that. I did have to report things once in awhile like the occasional marijuana smell emminating from under a dorm door. But for the most part, life was grand. I did repairs and we managed the house. We were in constant contact with the girls but nothing inappropriate ever occured between us and them.

Again as I mentioned in the other thread, we had a one bedroom apartment on the basement level with our own full kitchen and a rear entry so we could come and go discreetly if we wanted. We did not pay rent or utilities, all the food was provided and the military was paying my tuition and fees. So in order for us to live, we had to pay for the phone and my school books. Oh yeah, they also paid us a stipend of about $150 per month. It was a very sweet deal, plus I worked about 10 hours on weekend nights as a security guard and Mary worked full time during the week as a day care director.

So what about the stories? Some of the girls were top notch and were destined to finish college and make a great life and living for themselves. Others we wondered if they could figure out how to find their way out of a paper bag. The stories serve to prove my paper bag point. The first two are copied from the other thread, then I’ll add more as we remember them and as time permits.

Story #1: One day, one of the girls knocked on our door and said that her car wouldn’t start and would I come take a look at it. So I went out to the parking lot, leaned in through the open window, popped the hood release, then opened the hood (bonnet). The girl leaned over the under-hood area in amazement and said, “Wow! I’ve always wondered what was in there!”

Story #2: A couple girls asked me what they could do to fill in the tack holes in their white-painted walls (they had hung posters on the walls through the semester) so they could get their security deposit back. I told them that in a pinch, some people used toothpaste. When I went up to inspect the rooms later, the holes were filled in alright - with green gel toothpaste.

And more:

I was in the apartment when Mary busted in about ready to split a gut. She had been observing one of the girls, an education major mind you, in the kitchen attempting to cook dinner for her boyfriend. Macaroni and cheese was her dinner of choice for the evening. So in order to boil her noodles, the young lady measured exactly one cup of water in a measuring cup and poured it into her pan. Her boyfriend questioned her, “Why are you using only one cup of water?” She responded with, “I don’t like my noodles too runny.” (Evidently she didn’t know what a colander was and that the water is all poured off at the end.) As I walked into the kitchen, the girl had just finished boiling her noodles in her one cup of water and was busy dipping out as much of the water from the pan as she could with a table spoon. Then the directions called for the butter and milk. By the time all ingredients were added and stirred, the noodles looked like twigs floating down a swollen river. So in order to serve her majestic dinner to her beloved, she gently retrieved a spoonful of noodles at a time from the pool, patted them down between her hands in a folded over paper towel, then dropped them in two bowls, one for him and one for her. I didn’t stick around to see if the dinner included candlelight. No telling how that would have turned out.

More later…

2

One more then I have to go out and rake leaves.

Sometimes when a girl was washing clothes down in the laundry room, there would be reduced water pressure in the showers upstairs. As the story goes, a girl wanted to take a shower but forgot to open the lid on the washer downstairs to stop the water flow. So since her roommate was heading downstairs anyway, she was asked to open the lid on the washer. I was in the laundry room when the roommate walked in. She opened the lid on the washing machine, then turned to me and asked in all seriousness, “Do I have to open the dryer door, too?”

3

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! holy crap that is the funniest stuff i have ever heard!!!

4

Excellent stories, Bruce, and I look forward to hearing more.

At this point though, I feel duty bound to recount an episode from my first few weeks at university. My room mate and I had to do our first batch of washing away from home, and duly trotted down to the hall of residence (USA = dorm) laundry room. We put all our clothes in the machine, and not finding a specific powder drawer/tray threw a couple of cups of washing powder in the machine with our clothes.

We put our money in and turned it on. There then followed a brief moment of panic when we realised we’d put everything into the dryer.:o

5

s7ev0,

Fits right in! Fun stuff. Thanks.

Here’s another addition:

Michelle was another education major hoping to teach our future generations the wise ways of the world. She was in her last semester and was spending it student teaching a fine group of 3rd graders.

Here’s some key points to remember:

  1. Michelle hailed from downtown Chicago, inner-city, ghetto type neighborhoods.
  2. DeKalb is buried deep in the heart of the midwest farmland.

One fine Saturday, I walked into the door of the house that opened into the basement area and was greeted by the sound of a bird peeping. I followed the sound to the boiler room where I immediately began searching for the trapped bird in order to set it free. Suddenly, Michelle appeared in the door of the boiler room and was startled to see me. “What are you doing?” she gasped. I told her that a bird had somehow found its way into the boiler room and I was looking for it. She hesitated for a moment, then told me to look under a towel that was draped over a milk crate shoved in the corner. When I lifted a corner of the towel, a fluffy little yellow baby chicken peered back at me, peeping ferociously. Michelle sheepishly explained that, as it was Easter, she wanted to show the chick to her students. As she was not allowed to keep pets in the house, she chose to hide the chick in the boiler room.

Evidently, Michelle was doing a fine job of feeding the little chick because in four days, it grew to four times its size. I had to finally ask her, “Michelle, what are you going to do when this chicken is too big to care for anymore?” Remembering the key points, her answer was classic, “Oh, I’m just going to take it home and let it go.”

Mary and I envisioned newspaper headlines such as, “Thirty-Foot Chicken Eats Chicago.”

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One more short and sweet and sort of related to the last one. Before thanksgiving, our cook was preparing a grand turkey dinner for the girls before they left for the holidays.

The kitchen had two doors and the girls frequently cut through the kitchen to get to the back door. Cookie was in the kitchen with a 25 lb. turkey on the cutting board. As a girl cut through the kitchen, she glanced quickly over at the turkey and said, “Wow, that’s a big chicken!” then continued casually on her way out the back door and headed off to class.

7

More from the kitchen.

On a weekend, one of our girls had to make chocolate chip cookies for one of her classes. Big commercial kitchens can be a little intimidating I suppose. She thought she had followed the recipe closely but to her horror, she found that she had neglected to mix softened butter into the dry ingredients. Now that the cookie dough was pretty much formed, she had a dilemma. I guess she thought that the quickest or easiest or most efficient (actually, we don’t know what she was thinking) way then was to melt the butter and add it in as a liquid. So into the microwave went the butter. When it was sufficiently popping and boiling, she grabbed the butter from the microwave, threw it into the batter and promptly melted all the chocolate chips.

The chocolate chipless cookies actually tasted pretty good.

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Bruce, if anything confirms Intelligent Design as the new Absolute Truth, it is your hilarious stories. Clearly such stupidity could only result from the desire of an Intelligent Designer to amuse you.

It’s a good thing your sorority girls weren’t Noah, or else we’d be living without chickens today. They would have seen the turkeys and the chickens walking up the gangplank and said “Sorry, we can only take one pair. The little ones have to stay behind…”

9

Bruce, great thread, thanx.

PS. Did you know…

10

A guy at my dorm died from that.

He put it over his head, presumably, to avoid wasting any of the lighter gas he was sniffing at the time.

Ok, truth be told, the bag was made of plastic.

11

I was changing a tire for one of the girls as she looked on. When all was put back together and I was about to reinstall the hub cap, she asked, “Could you make sure the little symbol in the middle is right side up? I like my hub caps straight.”

12

Hey, now I did know that. I have to work on the GP today. Seems we have a certain “Death Wobble” (it’s what it’s called. Mary loves the name) in the front end. Very dangerous to drive at high speeds.

13

Well, there’s nothing like a bit of mechanical attention on it’s birthday.

14

Dave,

I didn’t pick up on the birthday thing. Thanks. I let Ben know just as he was heading out the door for school.

Bruce

15

Another story before I hit my chores for the day:

During finals week of our last semester in the house, one of the girls came knocking on our door with two guys in tow. She explained that the boys were from the Pike frat house across the street and wanted to borrow our lawn mower. “You know them?” I quizzed? “Yep,” she said, they’re from the Pike house. So as I was walking out to the shed, I explained to the guys that I would need the mower back in a few days at the end of the week. Our grass was getting long and I needed to cut it over the weekend. They promised to have the mower back so off they went with the mower happily in hand.

Of course the end of the week and the entire weekend came and went, and pretty soon all was quite on Greek Row as the students had all left for home. Well into the next week the mower had still not reappeared so after many phone calls, I tracked down the home of the girl who had brought me the two boys in the first place.

“Where’s our lawn mower?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Well, who are the guys who borrowed it?” I continued.

“I have no idea who they are.”

“I thought you said they were from the Pike house.”

“Well, they told me they were from the Pike house.”

“Idiot!” I muttered under my breath as I hung up the phone.

Needless to say, we never saw our mower again. I had graduated the December before (1989) and now had a job in industry. Mary and I had purchased a house in some small farm town not too far away called Rochelle and we were moving out of the sorority house. The local sorority director accused us of needing a new mower at our new house and stealing theirs so tried to charge us for the mower. Somehow I was able to convince her that we were telling the truth about the whole story. I don’t know if she went after the girl or not. We’ll never know and that’s fine with me.

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I posted this one over in the “I won the U.K. National Lottery” thread once upon a time. I suppose it belongs here.

We were in charge of purchasing supplies, contracting maintenance, hiring and firing the house staff, etc. A salesman called up once, got ahold of one of the girls and laid out the line, “Hey, I was just over to your house and noticed that you were low on some product. I’ve put a shipment together and need to get it out to you. Is that okay?”

The girl responded, “Uh, I guess so.”

So that was all the salesman needed, a verbal contract. I had no idea that this conversation had taken place until I received three boxes of urinal blocks via UPS a short time later.

So I called up the guy and told him that only Mary and I were on the signature card for ordering supplies. Since I received boxes of unordered product, I could only assume that he was requesting storage for his project at our facility. I informed him that the storage fees were $1 per day per box. When when we was ready for his product, give me a call and I would send an invoice for the storage fees. He didn’t like me very much and had some nice flowery language for me over the phone.

So I gave him a second option. Since it was obvious that a sorority house had no use for urinal blocks, I would put the boxes out on the front porch and he could issue a UPS pickup tag for them. If the boxes were still there when UPS came, good for him.

Before we set the boxes out on the front porch, Mary and I and the girls had some fun playing soccer in the dining room using the boxes as the soccer balls.

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Remembered another one…

There were no prepared meals on the weekends so the girls had to fend for themselves. There were plenty of leftovers in the big commercial fridge so a lot of the girls survived by raiding the fridge throughout the weekend. We had a policy that if a girl ate the last of the food in a dish, she had to wash the dish and put it away. Otherwise, Mary and I would be up washing dishes until midnight on Sunday night.

It was a good policy on paper. But on Sunday nights, Mary and I would open the refrigerator doors to find a dozen or more bowls and dishes each containing about a teaspoon of food. Neat way to avoid washing the dish, eh?

Well one Friday dinner, the cook prepared Chinese food. We had previously ordered fortune cookies to go with our meal. About lunchtime on Sunday afternoon, I saw that there were only a few fortune cookies remaining in the dish. That’s when the light bulb went on. I took one of the cookies from the dish back to our apartment for an operation. Using tweezers, I gingerly fished out the fortune paper inside the cookie and replaced it with one of my own specially prepared fortunes. When I returned to the kitchen a little later, I saw that the fortune cookie dish was empty on the counter. Perfect! So I left my little surprise in the dish and retreated to the lounge area to wait for the next cookie eater. I didn’t have to wait long before a girl came in the back door of the house and cut through the kitchen. She was in the kitchen a long moment before I heard her let out a mouthful of obsenities. What was her fortune? It said, “She who eats last cookie must wash dish.” She didn’t speak to me for a week after that.

18

Yoopers, those are some great stories. I have not had the fortune of experiencing things like that. I don’t have much exposure to the sorority life, but I’ll gladly live that life vicariously through those stories. :slight_smile:

19

This isn’t really a funny story but it’s still very interesting. Several of the girls had become involved in ‘playing’ Ouiji, you know, the innocent kids game from Milton Bradley. During Christmas break, I happened to find the pointer from the game in the lounge. There was no one left on all of Greek row and Mary was at work, so no one saw me crumple up the pointer, walk out and drop it in the trash bin.

About three weeks into the next semester, a girl walked up and pointed a finger in my face. “You have the pointer to our Ouiji game.” When I denied that I had it and asked why would she say that, she said that they had used a makeshift pointer, and when they asked it where the original pointer was, it spelled out my name.

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That’s kinda creepy…