For many of us, college marks the first extended experience of extra-residential residence, of making ourselves (pardon the obligatory branding) AT HOME away from home, of living with strange people or, at a minimum, strange people to whom we’re unrelated.
Midway through August, for example, my elder nephew, Ian, relocated from Imperial and his cozy familial digs to Rolla and the Missouri University of Science and Technology—and reports from him, direct and indirect, have made me muse on how drastically the average college freshman’s living arrangements have changed over time.
It almost goes without saying that telecommunications have undergone a quantum leap since I myself attended Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau three decades ago. Nowadays, Ian, with everyone but Ned Ludd’s spiritual heirs and me, packs a smartphone that resembles nothing so much as a pregnant domino, and a genteel haze worthy of Henry James obscures even the era of the individual landline in the dorm room. “Back in the day,” of course, the denizens of SEMO’s infamous Towers West residence hall relied on just two landlines hung in the corridor on opposite corners of each floor, cudgel-like Ma Bell relics whose communal nature at times informally introduced non–liberal arts majors to Samuel Beckett. (B-r-r-ring! “Hello?” “Lemme talk to ’Weasel.” “Dude, Weasel hasn’t lived here in three semesters.” “Oh. OK. Sorry. ’Bye.” Click!)
In collegiate bedding, too, a new day has dawned—or more aptly, a new night has fallen. Long before my nephew ever began to bunk at Rolla, a Missouri S&T rep inquired if his family wished to buy his sheets through the university, a deal to which my sister, Tracy, eventually agreed, using a rationale that involved arcane considerations like threadcount.
(As an aside, to a career bachelor who toiled for 12 years at the “Big Four” accounting firm of Ernst & Young, the phrase threadcount makes my phiz squinch like Popeye’s. Who, precisely, counts those threads? It would seem an unspeakably thankless task. Moreover, given that “the market” appears to value threadcount, who, precisely, audits that measure of value for accuracy? To echo Juvenal’s [Q]uis custodiet ipsos / Custodes?, who re-counts the threadcounter’s count?)
When I lived on good ol’ 7 West at SEMO, we felt blessed that the university provided us with beds, steel-framed singles sans box springs, whose grim gray paint, in all likelihood, somewhere covered a previously stenciled “PROPERTY OF ALCATRAZ.”
Still, to be perfectly honest if not perfectly frank—“Keep the blog out of the bog, for pity’s sake,” my EIC beseeched—I feel most confused about a bathroom matter at Missouri S&T. To wit, my nephew and his fellows there must purchase their own toilet paper, a policy that crosses Jack Paar’s famous W.C. joke with the modern WTF. When that lower-G.I. innovation in higher education came to my attention, it confounded me. Even during the dark days of the late ’70s and early ’80s in Towers West, when SEMO administrators evidently considered our yearbook photos mug shots waiting to happen, the supply of toilet paper ranked as a given, an amenity I later learned to be classed under “common area maintenance” by commercial real estate appraisers. In consequence, Missouri S&T’s Charmin chicanery makes me feel positively Ivy League, even though my own alma mater, during my residence there, downgraded dorm contracts from bona fide leases to something like bus-depot locker agreements because of an off-the-cuff lab experiment involving gravity and a steroidal shopping cart and (allegedly) originating on 7 West.
In any event, when Ian returns home from Rolla for Thanksgiving, I plan to question him further regarding Missouri S&T’s residential peculiarities. In light of its S.O.P. on T.P., though, I already feel (shall we say) choleric about the university’s provision of hand soap in lavatories.
