Last night I was woken up at 2am, when one of my male neighbors walked through the hall singing “We Are the Champions” in his loudest, deepest voice.
Earlier this week, a few guys from my floor threw a broken television set over the 8th-floor balcony to the sidewalk below. (I haven’t a clue where this TV came from, as I haven’t yet met anybody in the building who has one.) I only heard about this spectacle, and didn’t witness it personally—thanks to the building-maintenance people the mess was cleared by the following afternoon.
Other things that have been thrown over the balcony since I’ve been here: an already wrecked, hopelessly-twisted bicycle…and a perfectly functional metal shopping cart from the local grocery store. There are a few students who will occasionally, when they have a lot of stuff to carry back with them, steal a cart from the store and push their purchases back to our temporary home. This might not be so bad if they actually returned the cart afterward, but instead they abandon the carts in the lobby (or even the hallway) for the maintenance people to deal with.
I don’t know if maintenance returns the carts to the store in question, or just throws them away without going through this additional trouble, but they’re never around for very long—even the cart that “mysteriously” flew over the 8th-story balcony, found bent and misshapen on the sidewalk. If only they were as quick about fixing my heat when it malfunctions, and replacing the microwave.
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When I was in college, the guys in the all male dorm managed to throw their soda vending machine out of the window on the 8th floor. I have no idea how they managed it. The school took all of the vending machines off of the top 3 floors after that.
Around here you see carts abandoned at bus stops all the time. Mr. F used to work loss prevention for a supermarket, and his boss would actually drive around in a van looking for abandoned carts every couple of weeks or so.
Gathering shopping carts was one of my side jobs during studies. Once per year we’d go out to all large appartment blocks in the neighbourhood and gather a ton of them. This was a good opportunity to get out of the underground garage for a while. The concierge of one of the buildings would give us a bottle of wine as thanks. dat waz really …hicks… cool!
Kerry, did you go to Virginia Tech? If so, I know exactly what you are talking about. I lived in Vawter, but was in Pritchard the night that thing went for a fly. I actually saw it streak past my friend’s window.
My younger sister works for a grocery store, and she once worked for a branch in a “not so good” area of town. Which also happened to have low-rent apartments nearby. Needless to say, these people often tried to take the carts home with them. I say they “tried” to, because this store finally got smart and installed some kind of special tracking mechanism that would automatically lock the wheels once the carts got a certain distance away. So luckily they didn’t have to go very far to retrieve these carts, but they were always scattered around the outer edges of the parking lot.
I think that’s a pretty rude thing to do (throwing carts down 8 floors). Not to mention the fact that someone could get hurt.