How To Annoy Unwanted Roommates
How To Annoy Unwanted Roommates ================================Do all your homework in the bathroom, using the toilet as a desk.Hang all of your posters up facing the wall.Put up traffic signs around the room. If your roommate doesn't obey them, give him/her tickets. Confiscate something your roommate owns until s/he pays the tickets.Whenever he is about to fall asleep, ask questions that start with "Didja ever wonder why....". Repeat everything your roommate says.Open your window shades before you go to sleep each night. Close them as soon as you wake up.Constantly clog the toilet and flush till it fills up with water, then close the lid and tell no one.Tell your roommate on a daily basis that s/he is projecting negative karma.Paint the walls in their room black telling them not to worry, it's only water paint.Talk while pretending to be asleep.As soon as your roommate turns the light off at night, begin singing famous operas as loud as you can. When your roommate turns on the light, look around and pretend to be confused.Sit and stare at them while they are doing some other task. If they look over at you, very slowly move your head and gaze in another direction. Go back to staring at them, and repeat as many times as you can before they leave. Mumbling to yourself helps as well.Every Thursday, pack up everything you own and tell your roommate you're going home. Come back in an hour and explain that no one was home. Unpack everything and go to sleep.Chew with your mouth open. Works really well with super crunchy food such as apples.Make toast for breakfast every morning, but don't plug the toaster in. Eat the plain bread, looking at the toaster angrily, and complain that the toaster doesn't know what it's doing. If your roommate suggests plugging it in, go on a tangent about fire-safety hazards.Have really weird friends who have strange loud conversations. Whenever your roommate walks in, you all be quiet and stare at him/her until s/he leaves.Cut the faces out of all your pictures.When you walk into your room, turn off your lights. Turn them on when you leave.Sit on the floor and talk to the wall.Collect potatoes. Paint faces on them and give them names. Name one after your roommate. Separate your roommate's potato from the others. Wait a few days, and then bake your roommate's potato and eat it. Explain to your roommate, "He/She just didn't belong."Shelve all your books with the spines facing the wall. Complain loudly that you can never find the book that you want.Whenever your roommate walks in, wait one minute and then stand up. Announce that you are going to take a shower. Do so. Keep this up for three weeks.Dress as similarly as possible like your roommate. Walk closely next to him/her the whole day, remarking "Don't we look like twins?" to any passersby.Cultivate a lisp. Claim it's an accent.Bowl inside the room. Set up tournaments with other people in the building. Award someone a trophy. If your roommate wants to bowl too, explain that s/he needs bowling shoes.Listen to radio static.Say everything in Pig Latin.Get some pets - preferably two hyperactive cats and a bird.If you live on the first floor, refuse to use the door. Climb in and out through the window. Claim doctor's orders.Put up flyers around the building, reporting that your roommate is missing. Offer a reward for his/her safe return.Make your bed 15 times a day. Sleep on the floor.Don't communicate with your roommates directly. If you need to tell them something, call a designated proxy (preferably your parents) and have them call your roommates. Once mastered, try to maximize the number of proxies.When your roommate is about to come home, hide in the closet. Five minutes after s/he gets home, walk out. If s/he comments, act as if you don't know what s/he's talking about.Whenever you go to sleep, start jumping on your bed. Do so for a while, then jump really high and act like you hit your head on the ceiling. Crumple onto your bed and fake like you were knocked out. Use this method to fall asleep every night for a month.Clip ads out of Soldier of Fortune and Weaponmaster Quarterly.Eat lots of alphabet soup. Throw out any of the letters that are in your roommate's name; claim you want nothing to do with them.If your roommate has cans of Chef Boyardee, buy dog food in similar-size cans. Switch the labels.Become a mime. Nothing is more annoying than a mime.Sign your roommate up for various activities. (Campus tour guide, blood donor, organ donor).Carry a crowbar with you at all times. Dress it.Whenever your roommate goes to sleep, wake up. Whenever your roommate wakes up, go to sleep.Hide a bunch of potato chips and Twinkies in the bottom of a trash can. When you get hungry, root around in the trash, find the food, and eat it. If your roommate empties the trash before you get hungry, demand that he reimburse you.Paint your half of the room black. Or paisley.Move your bed around the room once a day, and leave it in a new position every night.Whenever the phone rings, get up and answer the door.Pick up the phone every two minutes. Then slam it down and say, "Damn, missed them again!" Continue for two weeks.Let mice loose in his/her room.Ask your roommate to pose for a portrait. Leave.When your roommate comes in, pretend that you are on the phone, screaming angrily and shouting obscenities. After you hang up, say, "That was your mom. She said she'd call back."Talk. A lot.Insist that your roommate recite the "Pledge Of Allegiance" with you every morning.Frantically scribble something on paper. When finished, eat it. Start again.Set your alarm clock to go off 1 hour after you leave the house for the day. Make sure the volume is turned up.Every time you wake up, start yelling, "Oh, my God! Where the hell am I?!" and run around the room for a few minutes. Then go back to bed. If your roommate asks, say you don't know what s/he is talking about.Take their food out of the fridge and replace it with yours.Read with a flashlight when the lights are on. Pretend to read without one when the lights are out, remarking every so often how great the book is.Learn to play an accordion.Have your insane family come stay with you for the week.Replace his/her toothpaste with Fix-O-Dent.Learn the words to all your roommate's favorite songs. Sing along.Every time your roommate walks in yell, "Hooray! You're back!" as loud as you can and dance around the room for five minutes. Afterwards, keep looking at your watch and saying, "Shouldn't you be going somewhere?"Put your underwear in the fridge, and on their food.Leave memos on your roommate's bed that say things like, "I know what you did," and "Don't think you can fool me." Sign them in blood.Build a creepy shrine devoted to the roommate you want to get rid of.Hang a picture of your roommate on the wall. Throw darts at it. Smile at your roommate often, saying things like, "How nice to see you again."Smile. All the time.Mention that you spent some years as a student revolutionary hiding in Canada. Stop. Look over your shoulder.Leave apple cores on his/her bed.Make the other roommates take their shoes off by the door. The key is to then take all of their shoes and put them in a bin in the bottom of the closet. Do this all the time and only to their shoes. Your shoes are cool enough to stay by the front and back door.Tell your roommate that your toe hurts, and that means there's going to be an earthquake soon. While your roommate is out, trash everything on his/her side of the room. When s/he returns, explain that the earthquake hit, but only on one side of the room.Put out a plate of cookies at night. Tell your roommate that they're for the Sandman. Take a bite out of one of the cookies while your roommate is asleep. The next morning, accuse your roommate of having bitten one of the cookies. If s/he tries to tell you the Sandman did it, insist that you know what the Sandman's teeth marks look like and that those are, in fact, not the Sandman's teeth marks. Grumble angrily and storm out of the room.Spend 90% of your time at home whistling. Don't go for a tune or anything, just random notes.Drink directly from the bottles/containers rather than using a glass.Wear a paper hat. Every time your roommate walks in, say, "Welcome to McDonald's, can I take your... Oh, it's just you." Take off the hat, sit, and pout.Keep the room temperature at a level that only you can be comfortable with, i.e., 65 F in the wintertime or below.Call him/her Mommy.Praise The Computer. Call your roommate "citizen" and ask him if he is happy. Every five minutes.Clip your fingernails and toenails and keep them in a baggie. Leave the baggie near your computer and snack from it while studying. If s/he walks by, grab the bag close and eye him/her suspiciously.Talk on the phone in gibberish. Use a high-pitched, squeaky tone.Wish your roommate "Happy small reptile day". Everyday.Build a snowman out of big balls of toilet paper. Throw water on it and begin to cry that the snowman is melting.Keep a vacuum cleaner in the middle of the room. Look at it with fear for a few days. Then stay out of the room entirely, opening the door only a crack and whispering to your roommate, "Psst! Is it gone?"Subscribe to as many mailing lists and reply to as much junk mail as possible under your roommate's name. Complain that you never get mail.Make your finger talk to you.Buy a jack-in-the-box. Every day, turn the handle until the clown pops out and then scream.Draw a tiny, black spot on your arm. Make it bigger every day. Look at it and say, "It's spreading, it's spreading."Create an army of animal crackers. Put them through basic training. Set up little checkpoints around the room. Tell your roommate that the camel spotted him/her in a restricted area and said not to do it again. Ask your roommate to apologize to the camel.Dress in drag.Plant grass in the carpet and scream at your roommate every time s/he takes a step in the room. Put up a "please don't walk on the grass" sign.Move everything to one side of the room. Ask your roommate if s/he knows how much an elephant weighs, and look at the floor on the empty side of the room with concern.Whenever someone knocks, answer the phone.Pack your roommate's clothing in ice overnight. Put it back in the dresser before s/he wakes up.Watch nothing but Japanese animation. Sing along (in Japanese) to the soundtracks.Answer everything with, "Why?"Hang up pictures of chickens all over the room. If your roommate eats eggs, yell at him/her and call him/her a cannibal.Spend all your money on Transformers. Play with them at night. If your roommate says anything, tell him with a straight face, "They're more than meets the eye."Always flush the toilet three times.Spell out the last word of each sentence you say to your roommate.Twitch a lot.Paint abstract paintings, and title them things like, "Roommate Dying in a Car Crash," and "Roommate Getting Whacked in the Head with a Shovel." Comment often about how much you love the paintings.Walk and talk backwards.Remove your door. Replace it with a bead hanging or an animal hide.Communicate using only your eyebrows and tongue.Throw your dirty clothes on THEIR bed.Talk to your roommate but don't let any sound come out. Get mad at him/her for not listening to you.Every time your roommate comes in, immediately turn off the lights and go to bed. When s/he leaves, get up and loudly yell, "Okay, guys, you can come out now."Take up cooking. Cook exotic foods from scratch without using any cookbooks or recipes.Build an antfarm. Let your ants have "jailbreaks". Then ask your roommate to help you hunt down all the renegade ants.If they ever put sticky notes saying "Don't eat" or "Don't drink" on the food and beverages, make sure you eat the immediately then claim you didn't notice the note.Constantly wear their good clothes.Sacrifice vegetables in the middle of the room.Constantly slip and fall on your carpet.Set up about twenty plants in an organized formation. When your roommate walks in, pretend to be in the middle of delivering a speech to the plants. Whisper to them, "We'll continue this later," while eyeing your roommate suspiciously.Become a Trekkie. Talk to your communicator. Tell Scottie to beam you up and run quickly from the room. If your roommate asks, tell him/her "Dammit, Jim, I'm just a doctor!"Whenever your roommate is walking through the room, bump into him/her.Draw a chalk outline on the floor. When your roommate comes in, say, "Don't worry. It's not what you think." If s/he asks about it again, immediately change the subject.Start wearing a crown, all the time. If your roommate tells you to take it off, say, "Who the hell do you think you are? A king?"Start a scab collection. Keep it in a locked glass case on your desk. Tell your roommate that you know s/he was looking for the key.Challenge your roommate to a duel. If s/he refuses, claim that you have won by forfeit and therefore conquered his/her side of the room. Insist that s/he remove all of his/her possessions immediately.Walk like an Egyptian.Buy a telescope. Sit on your bed and look across the room at your roommate through the telescope. When you're not using the telescope, act like your roommate is too far away for you to see.Talk back to your "Rice Krispies." All of a sudden, act offended, throw the bowl on the floor and kick it. Refuse to clean it up, explaining, "No, I want to watch them suffer."Read your textbooks aloud. Ask your roommate for help on big words.Hide road kill under their bed.Completely over-decorate for the holidays. Make sure to place a really obnoxious decoration on the coffee table so that it clearly blocks view of the television. Also get a bunch of noise makers so that you can't move around the house/apartment without three going off at a time. Bitterly complain when nobody helps you take the decorations down.Paint a tunnel on the wall like they do in cartoons. Every day, hit your head as you attempt to crawl through it. Hold your head and grumble, "Damn road runner...."Keep empty jars on the shelf. Tell your roommate that this is your collection of "inert gases." Look at them often. One day, act surprised and angered, and accuse your roommate of having released one of the gases. Cover your nose and mouth and run out of the room.Take all of your roommate's furniture and build a fort. Guard the fort for an entire weekend.Make cue cards for your roommate. Get them out whenever you'd like to have a conversation.Every time one of his friends walks into the room, scan them with a tricorder.Use a bible as Kleenex.Wear glasses, and complain that you can never see anything. Bump into walls and doors. Put your clothes on backwards. Say, "Who's that?" every time your roommate enters the room. When you're not wearing the glasses, act like you can see fine.Hoard the glasses. When your roommate leaves the room, at any time, and if only for a second, take the glass and place it in the dishwasher. If they confront you, tell them you thought it was a dirty, dirty glass and that they can get a new one out of the cupboard -- if they go to get another glass, ask them to start the dishwasher while they're over there.Call your roommate "Clyde" by accident. Start doing so every so often. Increase the frequency over the next few weeks, until you are calling him/her "Clyde" all the time. If your roommate protests, say, "I'm sorry. I won't do that anymore, Murray."When you write, use the wrong end of the pen. Ask him/her why it doesn't work. When s/he explains it to you, nod thoughtfully and say, "OK, I've got it." Turn the paper over, and try again.Wear your shoes on the wrong feet, all the time. Constantly complain that your feet hurt.When your roommate is typing, type on your keyboard in synchronization.Buy some knives. Sharpen them every night. While you're doing so, look at your roommate and mutter, "Soon, soon..."Claim to your friends (in the presence of your roommate) that you once learned how to diagnose psychological diseases by simply looking at people. Walk up to your roommate and whisper in his ear that the Mayo Clinic is only four hours away by air.Count down the days till the next full moon. Whenever you cross out another day, get a wild look in your eyes and mutter, "Soon...so very soon..."When someone is in the bathroom, about to take a shower or just using the toilet, knock on the door extremely hard, shout extremely loud saying you gotta pee really bad and basically do everything you can to get them out of there. Do this every time they use the bathroom.Learn a lot of quotations. Whenever you talk to your roommate, say nothing but quotes for several weeks.Whenever you're talking to your roommate, add extra words to your sentences ("Hey Dan, did you turn in your Calculus -lick- homework?"). When talking to other people around your roommate, add his/her name to your conversation ("Can you give me the -Dan- notes for Friday's physics class?"). If your roommate comments, act as if you don't know what s/he's talking about.Make pancakes every morning, but don't eat them. Draw faces on them, and toss them in the closet. Watch them for several hours each day. Complain to your roommate that your "pancake farm" isn't evolving into a self-sufficient community. Confide in your roommate that you think the king of the pancakes has been taking bribes.Talk like a pirate, all the time. Refer to your roommate as "matey." Threaten to make him/her walk the plank if s/he doesn't swab the deck.Every night, before you go to bed, beg your roommate for a glass of water. When s/he brings it, dump it on the floor and immediately go to sleep. If s/he ever refuses to bring you a glass of water, lie on the bed and pretend to be dying of dehydration, making annoying gagging sounds, until s/he does so.Keep a tarantula in a jar for three days. Then get rid of the tarantula. If your roommate asks, say, "Oh, she's around here somewhere."Stare at your roommate for five minutes out of every hour. Don't say anything, just stare.While your roommate is out, glue your shoes to the ceiling. When your roommate walks in, sit on the floor, hold your head, and moan.Lay in the middle of the room and chant to pagan gods.Hide your dirty dishes under their bed.Put your glasses on before you go to bed. Take them off as soon as you wake up. If your roommate asks, explain that they are Magic Dream Glasses. Complain that you've been having terrible nightmares.Make a voodoo doll of your roommate. Kill it.Turn off the microwave when they're using it and put your own food in, claiming "It'll only be for a minute", then put it on for half an hour.Stick post-its of reminders all around the house.Get some hair. Disperse it around your roommate's head while s/he is asleep. Keep a pair of scissors by your bed. Snicker at your roommate every morning.Put Vaseline on everything. Tell your roommate that you were just trying to "loosen up" the room.Buy a copy of Helter Skelter or Silence of the Lambs or any equally gruesomely titled book. Sit in a room with your roommate and read the book (or pretend to) with a highlighter mumbling, "That looks good..." as you highlight passages in the book.Have an invisible friend. Say you are giving him the silent treatment.Buy Sea Monkeys and grow them. Name one after your roommate. Announce the next day that that one died. Name another one after your roommate. The next day say that it died. Keep this up until they all die.Wear scary Halloween masks.Dye all your underwear lime green.Speak in tongues.Paste used Kleenexes to his/her walls.Buy a plant. Sleep with it at night. Talk to it. After a few weeks, start to argue with it loudly. Then yell, "I can't live in the same room with you," storm out of the room and slam the door. Get rid of the plant, but keep the pot. Refuse to discuss the plant ever again.Leave a declaration of war on your roommate's desk. Include a list of grievances.Scratch your head a lot. Pretend to eat the lice you find. Offer one to your roommate.Keep a collection of teeth in a jar. Act excited whenever you add to it, and say things like, "In a little while I'll have enough for that sailboat."Leave morbid outgoing messages on your answering machine. Be creative.Make a sandwich. Don't eat it, leave it on the floor. Ignore the sandwich. Wait until your roommate gets rid of it, and then say, "Hey, where the hell is my sandwich!?" Complain loudly that you are hungry.Nail boards across your window. When your roommate asks why, tell him/her you know they're all watching you.Late at night, start conversations that begin with, "Remember the good old days, when we used to..." and make up stories involving you and your roommate.Ask your roommate if Bob, your invisible friend, can stay the night. If s/he agrees, ask your roommate if s/he can turn down the music. Explain that Bob has a headache.Go through medical supply catalogs circling all electric drill and suction devices. Leave them (the catalogs, not the devices) lying around.Throw darts at a bare wall. All of a sudden, act excited, telling your roommate that you hit the bull's eye.Collect potato chips that you think look like famous people. Find one that looks like your roommate. Burn it, and explain, "It had to be done."Cover your bed with a tent. Live inside it for a week. If your roommate asks, explain that "It's a jungle out there." Get your roommate to bring you food and water.Hide laxatives in all their food and hoard all the toilet paper.Complain that your elbows, knees, and other joints have been bothering you. Get a screwdriver, and pretend to "fix" them.Send flowers to your roommate, with a card that says, "I'm sorry. It won't happen again." When you see them, start ripping up the flowers. Repeat the process for a few weeks.Leave Kleenexes dipped in mayonnaise on the floor. Tell guests that your roommate is disgusting and show them.Walk, talk, and dress like a cowboy at all times. If your roommate inquires, tell him/her, "Don't worry, little buckaroo. You'll be safe with me."Pack up all of your things and tell your roommate that you're going away to "find yourself." Leave, and come back in about ten minutes. If your roommate asks, explain that you're not a hard man/woman to find.Hang stuffed animals with nooses from your ceiling. Whenever you walk by them mutter, "You shouldn't have done that to me."Burn incense.Move your roommate's personal effects around. Start subtlety. Gradually work up to big things, and eventually glue everything he owns to the ceiling.Skip to the bathroom.Hide your underwear and socks in your roommate's closet. Accuse him of stealing them.Begin to accumulate a used gum ball. Weigh it every day. Accuse your roommate of stealing gum.Leave the room at random, knock on the door, and wait for your roommate to let you back in. If s/he asks about it, go on a tangent about the importance of good manners.Bring in potential "new" roommates from around campus. Give them tours of the room and the building. Have them ask about your roommate in front of him/her, and reply, "Oh, him/her? S/he won't be here much longer."Spread toothpicks all over the floor. Stare at them, acting like you're trying to read something. Tell your roommate it's a message from God, but you're not sure whether it's a warning about a loved one in danger or a recipe for really great chili.Groom yourself like a cat.Lock your door every time you go through it. Tell him/her that you're afraid of aliens.Take karate lessons. Insist on practicing the screams and moves in the room.Wear a cape. Stand in front of an open window for about an hour every day. Then, one day, when your roommate is gone, go outside and lie down underneath the window, pretending to be hurt, and wait for your roommate to return. The next day, start standing in front of the window again.Every time the phone rings, turn on the stereo at full volume and begin to violently slam-dance with your roommate. If s/he asks about it, say, "Oh, that damn hypnotist...."Announce everything you do as a group activity. (i.e. "We're going to bed now.") If your roommate fails to do whatever you said, accuse him/her of not being a "team player."Put masking tape on the windows in occult patterns.Switch the sheets on your beds while he is at class.Read the phone book out loud and excitedly. ("Frank Johnson! Oh wow! 894-8302! Holy cow!")Use a watergun for a TV remote control.Name your books. Call them like dogs when it's time to study.Every now and then start twitching violently and scream "Snakes, snakes!"Nail meat to the walls. Bacon is best.Scatter stuffed animals around the room. Put party hats on them. Play loud music. When your roommate walks in, turn off the music, take off the party hats, put away the stuffed animals, and say, "Well, it was fun while it lasted."Never speak to your roommate directly. If you need to ask or tell him/her something, go to another room and call him/her on the phone.Whenever your roommate sneezes, go and hide in the closet. Look around nervously for the rest of the day.Disconnect the Internet when you think your roommates really need it or when you feel like it. Also institute stupid firewall policies that block them from Twitter, Facebook, other common services. Or as an alternative, get your own personal laptop and load your roommates' computer with plenty of advertisement-displaying software.Shadow box several times a day. One day, walk in looking depressed. If your roommate asks what's wrong, explain that your shadow can't box with you anymore due to an injury. Ask your roommate if you can box with his/her shadow.Every time you take a shower, yell audibly, "I'm melting, I'm melting!"Buy a McDonald's "Happy Meal" for lunch every day. Eat the straw and the napkin. Throw everything else away.Shave one eyebrow.Put a combination lock on the fridge.Write backwards on the walls.Eat all of roommate's food in fridge or off his/her platePlay hide and seek with yourself. If your roommate asks what you're doing behind the couch, under the table, etc., look at them exasperatedly, come out of hiding and tell him/her that s/he gave away your hiding place. Refuse to talk to him/her for several hours.Refer to yourself in the royal third person.Gather up a garbage bag full of leaves and throw them in a pile in his/her room. Jump in them. Comment about the beautiful foliage.Tell your roommate that someone called and said that it was really important but you can't remember who it was.Save the wrappers to everything that you eat. Collect them in a ball and store it on your roommate's bed.Get a Brother P-Touch labeler. Label EVERYTHING!!!Explain that you need to sell your bed to make ends meet. Ask if you can sleep in your roommate's bed. If s/he refuses, ask if you can sell his/her bed instead.Compose an obituary for your roommate. Keep it posted in a conspicuous place and update it frequently. Report the date of death as one week before the end of the semester.Steal all of your roommate's pens.Dress like a military officer. Insist that your roommate salute you upon sight. If s/he refuses, insist that s/he do 100 push-ups. Keep saying things like, "Your momma isn't here to take care of you any more."Instead of taking your garbage out to the curb, leave it by the backdoor and yell at them when they don't take it out to the curb -- after all, you did all the hard work.Unplug everything in the room.Do impressions all the time, like of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jerry Seinfeld.Go through your roommate's textbooks with a red pen, changing things and making random corrections. If your roommate protests, tell him/her that you just couldn't take it anymore.Every time your roommate falls asleep, wait ten minutes, and then wake him/her up and say, "It's time to go to bed now."When talking to him/her, alternate between being exceedingly polite and disgustingly rude every sentence.Meditate in a kimono in the living room when your roommate has guests.Refuse to communicate in anything but sign language.Accidentally fill the shampoo bottle with hair dye.Administer last rites as s/he sleeps.Cry a lot.Redivide the room horizontally. Claim you want the bottom half.Start a post-it note collection. When complete, wallpaper the entire dorm room with it.Fill an empty shaving cream can with whipped cream. Use it to shave, and then spray some into your mouth. Later on, complain that you feel sick. Continue this process for several weeks.Play violent games with imaginary friends.Wipe deodorant all over your roommate's walls.Array thirteen candles of different colors and sizes on your dresser. Refuse to discuss them.Wear sunglasses at night. Bump into things often. Swear loudly.Buy some turtles. Paint numbers on their backs. Race them down the hall.Tell your roommate, "I've got an important message for you." Then pretend to faint. When you recover, say you can't remember what the message was. Later on, say, "Oh, yeah, I remember!" Pretend to faint again. Keep this up for several weeks.Give your roommate a jar of peanuts. Wait until s/he has eaten half of them, then explain they used to be chocolate-covered, but you licked all the chocolate off of them. As an aside, mention that you are coming down with the flu.Mount a wall-sized mirror on your wall and then ask your roommate not to look at it because demonic forces from the other side will escape into this world if s/he does.Develop ESP. Answer all of your roommate's questions before s/he asks them.Watch "Psycho" every day for a month. Then act excited every time your roommate goes to take a shower.Never flush the toilet.Become a secret agent for a week. Eat every piece of paper after reading it. Speak into your lapel. Accuse your roommate of stealing the secret plans to the world's greatest battle station.When you leave the room, put on a screensaver that says, "I'm watching you."Put your mattress underneath your bed. Sleep down under there and pile your dirty clothes on the empty bedframe. If your roommate comments, mutter "Gotta save space," twenty times while twitching violently.Take up playing a musical instrument. Practice constantly in the room, but don't play anything coherent. Play "Hot Cross Buns" or similar three-note songs twenty times until you get it perfect.Hide under their bed.Vacuum the carpets in the middle of the night.Hold a raffle, offering your roommate as first prize. If s/he protests, tell him/her that it's all for charity.Buy a lamp. Tell your roommate it's a magic lamp, with a genie inside it. Spend a week thinking about what to wish for. At the end of the week, report that someone has released the genie from the lamp. Blame your roommate.Wear a silly hat.

 

 

The Student and The Barometer

Some time ago I received a call from a colleague. He was about to give a student a zero for his answer to a physics question, while the student claimed a perfect score. The instructor and the student agreed to an impartial arbiter, and I was selected.

I read the examination question: "Show how it is possible to determine the height of a tall building with the aid of a barometer." The student had answered: "Take the barometer to the top of the building, attach a long rope to it, lower it to the street, and then bring it up, measuring the length of the rope. The length of the rope is the height of the building."

The student really had a strong case for full credit since he had really answered the question completely and correctly! On the other hand, if full credit were given, it could well contribute to a high grade in his physics course and certify competence in physics, but the answer did not confirm this.

I suggested that the student have another try. I gave the student six minutes to answer the question with the warning that the answer should show some knowledge of physics. At the end of five minutes, he hadn't written anything. I asked if he wished to give up, but he said he had many answers to this problem; he was just thinking of the best one. I excused myself for interrupting him and asked him to please go on.

In the next minute, he dashed off his answer, which read: "Take the barometer to the top of the building and lean over the edge of the roof. Drop the barometer, timing its fall with a stopwatch. Then, using the formula x=0.5*a*t^2, calculate the height of the building." At this point, I asked my colleague if he would give up. He conceded, and gave the student almost full credit.

While leaving my colleague's office, I recalled that the student had said that he had other answers to the problem, so I asked him what they were. "Well," said the student, "there are many ways of getting the height of a tall building with the aid of a barometer. For example,if the sun is shining you could measure the height of the barometer, then set it on end and measure the length of its shadow. Then you measure the length of the skyscraper's shadow, and thereafter it is a simple matter of proportional arithmetic to work out the height of the skyscraper.

"Fine," I said, "and others?"

"Yes," said the student, "there is a very basic measurement method you will like. In this method, you take the barometer and begin to walk up the stairs. As you climb the stairs, you mark off the length of the barometer along the wall. You then count the number of marks, and this will give you the height of the building in barometer units." "A very direct method."

"Of course. If you want a more sophisticated method, you can tie the barometer to the end of a string, swing it as a pendulum, and determine the value of g [gravity] at the street level and at the top of the building. From the difference between the two values of g, the height of the building, in principle, can be calculated."

"On this same tack, you could take the barometer to the top of the building, attach a long rope to it, lower it to just above the street, and then swing it as a pendulum. You could then calculate the height of the building by the period of the precession".

"Finally," he concluded, "there are many other ways of solving the problem. Probably the best," he said, "is to take the barometer to the basement and knock on the superintendent's door. When the superintendent answers, you speak to him as follows: 'Mr. Superintendent, here is a fine barometer. If you will tell me the height of the building, I will give you this barometer."

At this point, I asked the student if he really did not know the conventional answer to this question. He admitted that he did, but said that he was fed up with high school and college instructors trying to teach him how to think.

The name of the student was Niels Bohr, who later received the Nobel prize for Physics.