Roommates:
I think it was my mom who gave me the advise to not put any utilities in my name. I was in an off-campus apartment shared by three other girls. I remember thinking at the time "Oh, surely these nice girls wouldn't rip me off!" But I followed the advice, and had no utilities in my name. Thank you, Mom. By the end of my first year at flight school, in the days before cellphones were common, we had no phone in our apartment, and much of the year was spent with no electricity. This meant no hot showers too by the way. I usually did homework by candle light. No computers either, but then again nobody had a laptop back then anyway either. I remember it was December, and we (again) had the electricity shut off, and it was freezing in there, and we had candles all over the place, no phone, no TV or radio or anything. Taking an ice cold shower in the dark or with a candle (because I MUST lock the bathroom door no matter what, thank you Anthony Perkins) was loads of fun. I'm glad the candles never caught anything on fire, since we didn't have a phone with which to call for help. ;)
The bottom line is that the other two girls ripped off the third girl on the phone bill for the short time we had a phone. I did not. And the girl who had the electricity in her name, well, she was a crook of the highest order. I'll tell the story of her boyfriend next. But she would take our money to pay the electric bill, and then keep the money and not pay the bill. We would be none the wiser until the electricity was shut off a few months later, and she no longer had the money to pay it. So we'd stay without electricity until she'd pay up a little. Of course she had a boyfriend, so she'd stay with him for awhile, leaving the rest of us in the dark and cold.
We never did get our deposit back on the apartment, thanks to all the melted candle wax that got onto carpets, furniture, etc.
Back to my lovely crook of a roommate. She was nice to start with. Her name was Nicki, and the first semester we all got along great, including her. And then she found this boyfriend of hers, and joined a group of kids who were all "into" Malcolm X. Over the next few months, she became angry, distant, and slowly criminal. One day I got a call from my bank, who wanted me to come to their office right away, where they wanted to know why I'd written bad checks, and informed me of the serious consequences of bad check-writing. I most certainly had not written bad checks, and was in fact stunned. Fortunately, they still had copies of these checks, and I could prove that the writing was not mine-nor was the name used on them. They believed me. Someone had cleaned out my account and over-written it by $500.00 using the blank starter checks I had hidden in my underwear drawer. I went to the police, who told me it would take too much effort to find who did it and that they weren't really going to pursue it, but if I found out anything to let them know. *Ack* Well, I was a little angry at being ripped off. I remembered that one of the checks was to a local pizza place, and I happened to know that this pizza place required a student ID to accept checks. I remembered the name used on the starter check, and I went to the school and asked if they would look up the name on the student ID, which came with a photo of the person. They said no, that it was too much work, that they'd have to look through all the IDs by hand (they made two copies, one for the student, one for them). So I asked them for permission to look through all the IDs myself. They said yes. (Can you imagine this happening today?? For one thing, surely it's computerized by now, and for another, I hear the privacy violations piling up!) I took one friend I had there with me, and we went through every ID by hand, looking for that name. A few hours later, my friend found it--I looked at the photo, and it was my roommate's Boyfriend, using a fake name. I got permission to take the ID (again, :O), and I took it right to the police station, told them who he was, his real name, and the proof of what he'd done. I told them I wanted to press charges and I wanted him arrested. Last I knew, not a thing ever happened to him. Gotta love small town college justice. You do the work for them and they still won't do anything about it.
I confronted Nicki about it, and didn't really see her or him again for the rest of the year. But worst of all was the realization later on that in order to get to my checks, James was rifling through my underwear drawer. Ick. :(
So, my first year of flight school was memorable for many reasons. My first 'serious' boyfriend, my first time flying airplanes, my first experience outside of the Christian world, my first almost full-time job, my first time at feeling really truly disliked by a fairly group of people all at once, my first off-campus college experience period, and of course my first roommates. Before I go, let me describe them to you. There was Nicki, who was a pretty black young lady, who went bad, hung up Malcolm X posters, insisted that the "black race" didn't just want equality, they wanted to rule over the rest of us, who brought over her Malcolm X crew to the apartment, leaving the rest of us huddling out of the way in our rooms, who stole our electricity money, and whose boyfriend ripped me off and got away with it. Then there was Kimber. Kimber was a tiny, freckled, braided, tye-died hippy. She smoked clove cigarettes and pot constantly, and had an $80 a month allowance which she spent on those habits among others. She frequently had 'gentlemen' visitors that we'd wake up in the morning and find all over the living room asleep. She dug all the candles, man. *cough* Third, there was Melissa. She was a 6' something" tall very heavy bright red-headed girl who wanted to be a social worker. She opened and read my mail sometimes. At least she did until I took care of that problem too. But that's a story for another day. She wanted to be in a sorority very badly, and the one time I felt very sorry for her was the day they walked past our door at midnight, accepting all the little cute popular girls in the sorority, and not her. *sigh* And last but not least, there was me. Laurie Shaffer. Mid-sized brunette/redhead with freckles who wanted to do nothing but fly airplanes. No sororities. No clove cigarettes and "deep" conversations about the meaning of life. No angry mobs and dastardly plots against humanity. Just airplanes. And somebody put the four of us together in one apartment. Is that a sitcom in the works or what?? They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here you go, taken while we all still spoke to each other.
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