Lane’s Domain

14th Feb 2010

Tom Lane looks into the var­i­ous pranks inflicted on housemates

IT is a well-known fact in every stu­dent house that there is one per­son who all the oth­ers hate. And if you don’t know who this per­son is, it is you.

So you can appre­ci­ate, I hope, the acute dis­com­fort I feel that we are now in Feb­ru­ary and I have not wit­nessed in my house any vit­ri­olic cam­paign of char­ac­ter assas­si­na­tion directed against a fel­low res­i­dent. I am expect­ing any day now to have my pariah sta­tus affirmed in the most intru­sive and unam­bigu­ous means. For this is one thing you learn about the house­mate process: you do not dis­cover that they all hate you from sly com­ments or furi­ous out­bursts, you find it out when one day you arrive home and there is live­stock in your room.

Admit­tedly, it does not have to be live­stock. When I lived in halls, I under­stood per­fectly who the flat whip­ping boy was and did lit­tle to halt his plight. When­ever Hous­ing Ser­vices noti­fied us of an upcom­ing inspec­tion, sig­nif­i­cant amounts of local veg­e­ta­tion would be uprooted and relo­cated to var­i­ous parts of his room; there was also a noto­ri­ous inci­dent when he woke to find three hun­dred plas­tic cups filled with water piled up out­side his door, which he couldn’t get past with­out remov­ing one at a time.

Either way, you can cer­tainly be sure that incon­ve­nienc­ing those you live clos­est to will result in some degree of invol­un­tary redecoration.

Feel­ing that any calamity is best faced with prepa­ra­tion, I have ded­i­cated myself to col­lect­ing sto­ries of the worst exam­ples of house­mate enmity. And I will tell you this; they are ten a penny. It does not appear that any con­sid­er­a­tion for empa­thy, any sense of pro­por­tion, will stand in the way of a group of stu­dents intent on mak­ing life dif­fi­cult for their near­est and not-so-dearest.

‘Last year, we replaced our housemate’s cook­ing oil with urine,’ said one stu­dent. He bash­fully admit­ted: ‘We’re not sure if he ever noticed, but he kept using it all year. There were things he couldn’t ignore – like hid­ing alarm clocks under his bed, set to go off at half hour inter­vals through­out the night.’

Urine appears to have played a key role in the tor­ment inflicted on this indi­vid­ual; his house­mates would pee on his pil­low, or once he was wise enough to lock them out, on plates that they then froze and slid under the door. How­ever, things did not come to a head until the bio­log­i­cal func­tions employed in their pranks were stepped up to a more obscene level. ‘One of us began using his loaves of bread as toi­let paper,’ my con­fi­dant told me. ‘After that, he moved out. He only returned once, to do some laun­dry, and then my friend poured chilli pow­der into the wash­ing machine.’

But ani­mals appear to be the cen­tre­piece of any house con­flict. I have learned tales of sheep teth­ered to unsus­pect­ing vic­tims’ desks, dead octo­puses under their duvets, geese tied to their muesli coated legs. I myself have dis­cov­ered a sev­ered pig’s head under my bed, though in that case it was merely the crown­ing glory of a good-humoured prank war with a neigh­bour­ing flat.

The ques­tion that really needs answer­ing is, ‘why?’ Why are stu­dents so trag­i­cally inca­pable of peace­fully co-habiting? Extract­ing a sim­ple expla­na­tion as to why peo­ple can­not stand their house­mates is rarely pos­si­ble. The best usu­ally offered is: ‘You just have to live with them to understand.’

It is an inter­est­ing mys­tery, but I will have to leave you to dis­cuss it amongst your­selves. I’ve just heard strange equine noises ema­nat­ing from upstairs, so I’d bet­ter go and check what appalling fate has befallen my bedroom.