A Girl Named Sue or As the Dorm Turns

Written by Judy Seltenright

As some of you know I work at an all female college in one of the dorms. This dorm is the oldest one. It is a hundred years old & a lot of strange things are always going on there.

I am single with no children of my own. However at work I have  a hundred 17-22 daughters. It is a very strange job. You will see what I mean as you read this.

Strange you want to talk strange? Whenever I think I have seen it all these ladies prove me wrong.

One year we had a complaint about mice in the dorm. The employees looked everywhere. We could not find any evidence of mice in the public areas yet the students kept complaining about mice. We started to go into the rooms to set traps, the sticky kind. All of this was time consuming of course.

One poor student woke up with a mouse crossing her bed.

Students had enough they called the local news station. Yes you guessed it they came out cameras and all. We got a lot of bad publicity that day.

Well someone talked to much. It was found out a hand-full of students were going out & buying mice. They were putting them into other student rooms as a joke. Sure, right Haha funny NOT!

And of course there was the time that a student's hair turned a strange color. You see most of them leave their shower caddy's sitting outside their rooms. Someone put food coloring in the shampoo.

Strange sounds ? Yup we had those too. Walking down the hallway I could just barely hear a noise from one of the rooms. Come to find out a student found a mommy kitty with babies. Now the rules are if it can't live under water you can't have that pet in your room. Strange as it may seem I could not report it. It was dead winter, too cold outside. I did not hear anything strange no not me!

It seemed odd that one day we were given orders to watch for something strange on our dorm floors. Now what could be stranger then one hundred 17-22 year old females living on my floor. Well, looking for a strange package!

Look for a strange package oh sure. Do you have any idea how many packages are delivered in these dorms in a day? We house over 400 students in just this dorm. Well the strange package we were to look for turned out to be a bomb. There was a bomb threat called in! Unbeknown to us they sent us out looking for it. Fortunately, it was a false alarm, no bomb.

My all time favorite was the time they told us to watch for something strange going on. Yea what is not strange around here? The only thing we could think of was that strange student on the 4 th floor.

She seemed cold all the time. Going down the hallway to the shower room she would always be wearing the hood  up on her robe.

If she were going outside she always had the hood up even before she left her room.

She never had anything to say to any of us. If we said hello she would just wave at us. We said she should be a model she was so thin & tall. Of course, she most likely would not make it as a model because she was so shy & kept to her self. She only made friends with the girls in her room.

Well as it turned out, this was a boyfriend living in the room with one of the students, because he could not afford room & board at a college near by. He lived & used everything in our dorm. Yes including restroom & showers at the same time as other students were using them.So you see he was the girl named Sue. The only reason he was found out was because of room inspections..We have these inspections for safety reasons, lofts to high / candles / unsafe lamps / overload on appliances. The Hall Director found him hiding in the closet during one of the inspections!

Never found out what happened to our boy named Sue.

Don't you think it is a little strange that the college does not  ever want to tell us what we are looking for?

By: Judy Seltenright