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By Milena Pross Aug. 9, 2015 I\u2019m not normally one to write a review, but I feel it\u2019s my civic duty to warn my fellow students about a plague upon the House Systemhousing system. I\u2019m formally giving my new RA one star out of five. Let me tell you why. I returned to housing as a second-year this September, eager to see my friends, lose my student ID, and retrieve my \u201cweed\u201d that I had stashed away for later last June. I thought it was going to be a triumphant homecoming. But as soon as I made my bed and hugged my returning RA, I was called to an emergency house meeting. \u201cHey folks, I\u2019m Earl, and I\u2019m your new RA,\u201d said Earl, the new RA. \u201cI\u2019ve never lived in university housing before, but I\u2019m eager to start.\u201d Everyone in the lounge exchanged puzzled glances. What a mysterious fellow! Where did he come from? And what sort of wisdom did he have to impart? Many of us experienced house-livers were skeptical at first, but we thought he\u2019d adjust quickly and acclimatize to our community. It turns out we should have always trusted our guts and never trusted any optimistic possibility of social improvement. Earl continued talking with the confidence of a cowboy who just narrowly won a duel: \u201cI know I\u2019m new, folks, but I\u2019d like to make a few changes around here.\u201d Several of us seasoned residents rolled our eyes. We\u2019d seen people try to change us before, and we knew it was never going to work. So imagine our surprise when Earl told us to \u201cplease, be seated\u201d and proceeded to belittle us like the bunch of helpless infants we weren\u2019t. While he first appeared weak, meek, and ugly, Earl suddenly commanded the lounge with a vocal presence I\u2019ve only ever seen in wartime pump-up ralliesNazi propaganda films. He was stern\u2014more than stern., Hhe was loud. My ears suffered one thousand tiny deaths as he screamed his new rules at us: \u201cChange number one!\u201d Earl yodeled. \u201cI am instituting lock–down hours. The house is unsafe, folks, and the only way we can change that is to enforce a mandatory curfew. All residents must be in the house between the hours of 3pm and 9am. No exceptions. We will do a headcount every day.\u201d Sure\u2026 our RA last year said that too, but we knew it wasn\u2019t for real!. Earl continued with his booming speech: \u201cChange number two! I know you all love the lounge, which is why I kindly decided to open it up on Thursdays. That\u2019s right, folks, you can and must be in the lounge all day long on Thursdays, and no other days. I\u2019m calling this improvement \u2018Lounge Thursdays.\u2019\u201d What a prick. Doesn’t he know we HATE the lounge on Thursdays, and hope to only hang out there on certain Wednesdays and Saturdays? How lame. \u201cI\u2019m already sensing a bit of an attitude problem with you folks,\u201d Earl thundered. \u201cWhich brings me to change number three! Four days a week, during lock–down hours, we will have mandatory etiquette class. We are using a rigorous buddy system for etiquette class, and I expect you all to honor it.\u201d Okay, change of pace. This was starting to sound really cool. But Earl interjected with his amplified mouth again \u2014 \u201cI\u2019ll be picking your buddies.\u201d Rats. I won\u2019t bore you with more details, but Earl continued his deafening speech for several hours, ultimately instituting seventy-two changes. He altered a lot about my housedorm, and his modifications stuck. While I could live with the punishment cage and the nightly bedtime stories and tuck-ins, I was not a fan of the one-size-fits-all house uniforms we were all required to eat, sleep, and shower in. I also wasn\u2019t a fan of the supervised showers. All of Earl\u2019s rules seemed to come directly from an off-brand dominance\/submission porno that I definitely haven\u2019t seenwatched once by accident. When polled, a majority 65% of residents said they felt \u201cnot happy and\/or neutral\u201d about Earl\u2019s regulations. Personally, I hate him. Why give him one whole star instead of zero, you ask? Because as miserable as life has been, he\u2019s trying his best, and we’ve gotta give him the benefit of the doubt. Being a new RA is a tough job, and it\u2019s his journey, not ours. So why, you ask, am I not giving him five stars? Plain and simple: I hate that he keeps calling us \u201cfolks.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-komono"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2001"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2001\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3034,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2001\/revisions\/3034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chicagoshadydealer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}