If you pay close attention to your nose on a windy day, you can smell a very distinct rotting smell traversing the campus. It’s very faint but just distracting enough that people are starting to take notice. If you’re methodical enough or enlist the help of a doggo, you can trace the scent back to its source, which is exactly what I, investigative journalist extraordinaire, did.
Who I found at the end of that awful, putrid stench wishes to remain anonymous (mostly because they don’t want an angry phone call from their mother), but they have agreed to tell their story.
“It all started with my physics midterm,” the student related. “I really didn’t have any time to do laundry that week because I was hitting the books hard. I thought it was fine; I could do it later.”
In retrospect, the student seriously regrets this decision.
“But then that next week I had a Diff EQ exam, so it kept piling up. The basket started overflowing, but there was nothing I could do! I had to study.”
It wasn’t just their laundry that started to spill over.
“I couldn’t even take the trash out. First it was just trash bags scattered everywhere, but then I ran out of bags, so now it’s just garbage.”
You get the point. The student has neglected to clean for three weeks now and the results are horrifying. The door hardly opens. The beds now float precariously on a sea of filth, an unholy mix of dirty underwear, cereal bars, study guides and Monster energy cans. Layers have compacted and developed fault lines. Microearthquakes are now a real concern.
“My roommate is really passive-aggressive, so they built a depth meter for our room. We’re at about four feet now.”
The student’s roommate refused to tell their side of the story but has commented that if the trash piles up past six feet:
“I’m going to burn it all.”
Despite all this, the student doesn’t seem to understand the urgency of their situation.
“I get that I really need to clean, but at this point there’s so much that it would take days! That time is too precious to spend on that. I’ll clean when midterms are over.”
It is my dearest hope that the student is still alive after midterms, that they have not been absorbed and assimilated into their filth.
