Day 2

This post should be subtitled, "in which Kevin Ma becomes part of the Northwestern maintenance crew". I'll explain why after some preliminary paragraphs of me bitching.

Today has been so rough.

If counting just meeting times and excluding breakfast, lunch, and dinner breaks, I sat through 11 hours and 45 minutes of talking. Talking about rules, problems, call trees, camp policies, discipline.
But that wasn't bad.
We had one meeting scheduled for one hour at the end of dinner, which would conclude the day and leave us finished at 7:30. It went an hour over time.
But that wasn't that bad.
(Here's where I get into the subtitle)

The reason why today was such a struggle was that compounded with all this sitting, rules learning, policy hearing (all of which is very important for our jobs as RAs, TAs, and teachers), was a simple fact.

Let me preface this by saying that, as far as my knowledge goes, dorm life in most colleges concludes with a requirement for all students living there to reset the rooms to their original state. Notice the italics? Yeah, that sentence gets real important.

For anyone who isn't sure. I am going to be an RA at a camp for gifted forth through sixth graders. I, specifically, will be watching over forth graders and a couple of fifth graders. They are not that tall.
Here comes the laundry list that led to total exhaustion, frustration, and misery today.

1. Northwestern does not require their students to revert their rooms (at least in this dorm) to their original state.
2. Almost every single person living in this dorm last year decided to loft their bed up to the highest level possible.
3. This becomes impossible for 4'something children to sleep in. 
4. Also even if they manage to get into the sky high bed placement, parents would sue the pants off of every administrator, teacher, residential staff, and their first born children if a child fell off the bed and broke a bone.
5. Every bed is this crappy, poorly made, hard-to-disassemble mass of poles and pointy thingies that gets stuck easily in awkward places and requires PRECISE TIMING to remove each piece separately without the whole bed falling apart on your toes/hands/feet/body (which happened to one person six or seven times). Seriously, it's like playing a poorly conceived video game that's a mix between a rhythm game and waterboarding.
6. So far, Northwestern has REFUSED to deal with the bed lofting situation for us.


Thus...
I have spent the last 3 hours disassembling, de-lofting, reassembling, and removing beds.


Reminder.


THIS IS DAY





















TWO.









SHIT.