The appearance of this article must no doubt come as a shock, but yes, it’s true. The Interfraternity Council is back and ready to fill your brain on a biweekly basis. We’ve been restructuring our organization to better serve the students of RPI, both greek and independent, and would like to let you know what’s going on with us these days. Our new website is up and ready with a great deal of useful information, including an interactive calendar and a greek-life wiki. We will be starting up a new column in the articles section entitled “This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” chronicling the hilarity that ensues when things go awry in our houses and the lessons that we learn from such mishaps. Below is a segment of the first installment of the column.
How I Learned to Turn Off a Garden Hose:
It was 10 o’clock on a Saturday night and I was certainly not expecting anything of appreciable worth or excitement to occur on this innocuous January evening. I was sitting in the living room of my fraternity house when my little brother walked through the door and asked if I had seen the basement in an eerily calm and simple manner. Of course I had seen the basement, that’s where my food lives and my underwear gets cleaned. I have since learned that ambiguous questions delivered with such poise are often the most loaded and harmful to my mental well-being.
Concerned, I make my way down into the depths basement. Awaiting me was 3-5 inches of standing water in our boiler room and along our west wall, home to the majority of the house’s “expensive” electronic equipment (I use the term liberally.) It was stressful to realize that my house was flooding, my landlord was too far to be of use, and it was my job to make sure this gets addressed.
At this point a few facts regarding my upbringing become relevant to the story:
• I have seen the movie Home Alone. The furnace from the movie scared the crap out of me such that I was afraid to enter a basement until I was roughly 12 years of age.
• I grew up in northern New England. We did not have a basement; we had a sketchy stone hole in the ground (a crawl space) behind doors I was afraid to open because of Kevin McAllister.
• I have not lived in a house with a basement since I was 12. My parents live on a lake, and having a basement is asking for a flooding problem.
So, the house had a basement full of water and no idea of what to do with it. There were several suggested options (all of which were worthless) and subsequently dismissed…
For the rest of the story and other updates, please visit the IFC website at: htt://ifc.union.rpi.edu.
