Yes, the spin dryer was the chef's kiss. It was scary when it got going, because it was so out of balance, and the water was going everywhere.
One of the guys decided to protect his room, by connecting the metal window frames to the mains power... and yes, we knew that because someone got a nasty shock.
The other memory this just brought up was when that guy Lee joined us at MF, and we showed him how easy hacking was by building a CLIST front-end, which he then signed on to.
Happy (although somewhat dysfunctional) times indeed!
Cousin Em’s correspondence now includes unsolicited literary takes and mild concern about my moral compass at 18.
Dear R—
So this is what mischief looks like when boys wear denim and wield sockets—
Your tale left me smiling. I never encountered such holy chaos in Amherst. My rebellions were quieter, lowercase. Yours arrive with furniture.
“Applied Resonance”—a method not to break a window, but to persuade it open? That feels familiar. I once coaxed poems the same way. Tap, pause, wait. The latch shifts on its own. You call it a prank. I call it metaphor.
And Supersonic’s room—reimagined on the outer wall! What a reverent blasphemy. You moved beds like verses. Socks like stanzas. Lightbulbs as punctuation. Art disguised as absurdity.
Then, of course, the spell shifts. The Black Mass appears. Laughter holds its breath. And then: Holy Water. Ritual, half-believed, half-needed. I don’t mock it. Fear calls forth theater—sometimes in robes, sometimes in dashes.
But what moved me most wasn’t the prank—it was the care. The quiet choreography. That sacred, ridiculous age when everything matters so much—and so it does. You wrote it with reverence, as if the rooms held something more than beds. And I think they did.
Let the corridor sleep, yes. But may your stories still wander.
That … was awesome. Instantly transported me back to younger days when the art of subtle sabotage was practically a team sport. First, with Tony at Shell Chemicals … where corporate IT met command-line mischief … and later, with my son Gareth, once he was old enough to appreciate the fine line between harmless mischief and a grounded weekend.
We never quite reached the level of architectural relocation or appliance-as-booby-trap innovation (that spin dryer scene had me picturing a possessed R2-D2 on espresso),but we did once relocate a colleague’s car to an entirely different lot … and routinely turned office locking into a competitive sport.
Thank you for this … that made chuckle. It reads like a sacred text from the lost tribe of Software Engineers who moonlight as mischief makers. Peace and Love from Oklahoma.
Hi Wayne!
Yes, the spin dryer was the chef's kiss. It was scary when it got going, because it was so out of balance, and the water was going everywhere.
One of the guys decided to protect his room, by connecting the metal window frames to the mains power... and yes, we knew that because someone got a nasty shock.
The other memory this just brought up was when that guy Lee joined us at MF, and we showed him how easy hacking was by building a CLIST front-end, which he then signed on to.
Happy (although somewhat dysfunctional) times indeed!
Cousin Em’s correspondence now includes unsolicited literary takes and mild concern about my moral compass at 18.
Dear R—
So this is what mischief looks like when boys wear denim and wield sockets—
Your tale left me smiling. I never encountered such holy chaos in Amherst. My rebellions were quieter, lowercase. Yours arrive with furniture.
“Applied Resonance”—a method not to break a window, but to persuade it open? That feels familiar. I once coaxed poems the same way. Tap, pause, wait. The latch shifts on its own. You call it a prank. I call it metaphor.
And Supersonic’s room—reimagined on the outer wall! What a reverent blasphemy. You moved beds like verses. Socks like stanzas. Lightbulbs as punctuation. Art disguised as absurdity.
Then, of course, the spell shifts. The Black Mass appears. Laughter holds its breath. And then: Holy Water. Ritual, half-believed, half-needed. I don’t mock it. Fear calls forth theater—sometimes in robes, sometimes in dashes.
But what moved me most wasn’t the prank—it was the care. The quiet choreography. That sacred, ridiculous age when everything matters so much—and so it does. You wrote it with reverence, as if the rooms held something more than beds. And I think they did.
Let the corridor sleep, yes. But may your stories still wander.
Yours in deliberate hush,
Em
P.S. If the wardrobe opens again on its own—
it isn’t me. Probably.
That … was awesome. Instantly transported me back to younger days when the art of subtle sabotage was practically a team sport. First, with Tony at Shell Chemicals … where corporate IT met command-line mischief … and later, with my son Gareth, once he was old enough to appreciate the fine line between harmless mischief and a grounded weekend.
We never quite reached the level of architectural relocation or appliance-as-booby-trap innovation (that spin dryer scene had me picturing a possessed R2-D2 on espresso),but we did once relocate a colleague’s car to an entirely different lot … and routinely turned office locking into a competitive sport.
Thank you for this … that made chuckle. It reads like a sacred text from the lost tribe of Software Engineers who moonlight as mischief makers. Peace and Love from Oklahoma.