Sir, you're making a scene!

A couple nights ago, my roommates and I were written up by two RAs for a noise violation. We had come back late on a Friday night after drinking for a number of hours, and we were playing an innocent game of "Don't Touch the Hot Lava!" (For those of you who don't know what that game is...please delete yourself from my friends list because I now hate you. Just kidding, but it's a game where you have to jump from chair to couch to fridge or whatever else is in the room so that you don't touch the floor).

Anyway, we played for about 10 minutes before an RA came and said that we were being "much too loud." Okay, sure buddy. I told everyone that we needed to quiet down a little bit, but being that we were a little drunk and there were 10 of us in the room, all talking at once and doing various things, that was pretty impossible.

A few more minutes go by, and we hear another knock at the door. This time it is two RAs. Great, I guess they think we're hostile or something. The girl RA tells us that we were already warned once and since we didn't obey the all-mighty power-tripping RA commandments, we are going to get written up for a noise violation.

The whole concept of a "noise violation" has been bothering ever since. I'm paying about $4,000 a semester to live here. They're already telling me that I can't drink in my own room. Keep in mind, often times the people enforcing this rule are people who are 20 or younger. I am 21, and being told by an underaged person that I can't drink is something that gets me so pissed off I want to kick over small children. But I'm willing to look past that. Campus policy is campus policy and it's not THAT big of a deal in the scheme of things. But this noise violation bullshit...we weren't even drinking in the room or doing anything illegal. Just conversing, laughing, and playing a little Don't Touch the Hot Lava! And after the warning, we stopped playing and were just sitting around talking. Yeah, maybe we were a little noisy, but guess what? It was Friday night! What are we supposed to do? Not talk or laugh? A lot of people stay up and have fun until the wee hours of the morning. I can understand that they'd want to have people be quiet during the week because of class, but what do people have to do on a Saturday? Sleep in? They need to get used to a little noise. And if they're going to write us up every time we are that loud on a weekend night, they're going to run out of paper quickly.

While they were writing us up, they gave us your typical "we're just doing our job" speech. Give me a fucking break. I was coming back from downtown last night with two of my roommates and we were being very loud, singing and laughing and shouting as we walked along. A cop car pulls up next to us suddenly and says "Hey, shut up!" and then just drove away. He could have easily given us all tickets for drunk and disordery or public drunkenness or something like that, but instead, realizing that there are bigger fish to fry, he just tell us to shut up. You know what that's called? Perspective. That's what these RAs need. "Just doing our job." That's your job, to give people one warning and then get them all in trouble? Sounds like a fun job; I wish I could ruin peoples' nights like that.