mynutsitch.com

As promised, this is the first in a series of stories that came from my time spent at Oregon State University. This is a bit different than my usual style and ended up being quite long (as I’m sure you’ve noticed), but I promise it’s worth the read.

I met a lot of great people when I first moved down to the small town of Corvallis to go to Oregon State University. I moved into the dorms and immediately got along with almost all of the guys on our floor. Of the guys I really clicked with right off the bat there was:

Scott, my roommate, who was a really laid back cool guy
Ryan, a fellow computer geek and one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met
Keith, a graphic design guy and just an all around funny, wacky guy
and James, another real laid back dude who was just cool to be around

And then there was Frat Dude. You know, that typical frat guy. The natural enemy of the common nerd.

Frat Dude had inexplicably been paired up with the most unlikely roommate in the world, Stereotypical Nerd Boy. Apparently the housing people had gone through everyone else and had been left with these two last, because there is no way that the little surveys we filled out long before school started, telling them our habits and personalities in order for them to make a decent match, would have paired those two in a 8×10 room. Unless perhaps the sociology department sponsored some sort of study unbeknownst to us poor dorm-dwellers that year.

They were exact opposites. Stereotypical Nerd Boy just wanted to stay in his quiet room, study, read, and sleep. Frat Dude wanted to fuck random sluts on the top bunk with music blasting.

It’s hard to read a Biology textbook on your bunk when there’s some 6′6″ meathead pounding away on a girl named Brandi to the rhythmic beats of “California Love” 2 1/2 feet above your head.

Or so we were told.

Stereotypical Nerd Boy came to us mere weeks after classes started, recounting the many horrors he had endured so far. He had talked to the housing people and they said there wasn’t anything he could do except put his name on a waiting list in case an opening came up, which wasn’t too common so early in the year.

So he wanted to get him back. And he came to us.

He was a smart kid.

We quickly began formulating our game plan, right after making a large batch of sesame chicken flavored top ramen, because although we were not quite at the level of nerdiness that this kid was, we also despised the frat boy mentality being somewhat on the geeky side ourselves. This was a real life shot at “Revenge of the Nerds”-like defense of all that is good and geeky in this world and we weren’t about to pass it up.

Only a few minutes into our noodle-fueled brainstorming session, Stereotypical Nerd Boy’s eyes lit up like the Hindenburg and he blurted out something about a music file on Frat Dude’s computer. He went on to explain that he had heard him play this song…a song that featured Frat Dude on the vocals and his brother on the guitar.

A really shitty song.

We were somewhat skeptical. How bad could a song really be? How much damage could we do with it?

But he insisted that it was perfect, so we went with it.

He told us that Frat Dude’s computer was password protected, but that was back in the days of Windows 98 so it really didn’t matter. Silly Microsoft, making it so you can just hit “cancel” at the password prompt and it lets you in anyway. Silly computer manufacturers for making administrator passwords blank by default.

So our plan was a go. The mission was to get the file and….well, that was it. We had no idea what to do after that.

We hadn’t heard the file yet.

Stereotypical Nerd Boy had Frat Dude’s schedule completely figured out, down to every little activity plus or minus about 10 minutes. He knew he was going to be away that night, for sure, for some fraternity activity.

We were in and out like ninjas. Except ninjas don’t have nerds open the door for them. And we had a floppy disk instead of a throwing star.

Now, keep in mind that even though Stereotypical Nerd Boy had expressed extreme enthusiasm about using this audio file for extreme evil, we had no idea what we were about to listen to and had doubts about it’s usefulness.

Until we listened to it.

When I popped that disk into my computer, copied the file onto my hard drive, and fired up WinAmp, this is what we heard:

It’s OK…go ahead and give it a listen a few more times. That’s what we did. We were LITERALLY rolling on the floor laughing and couldn’t stop.

Our laughter soon turned into gigantic grins once we realized what we had in our possession. If someone had walked into the room at that moment they would have sworn they had just interrupted a medal ceremony for the Special Olympics, that’s the kind of grins we’re talking.

Go ahead…listen to it again. It gets funnier every time.

At that point, the possibilities seemed endless. But we were young and stupid and couldn’t think of anything to do with it. It was hilarious, but how could we use it to get under his skin? Especially if he was oblivious to the fact that it was unintentional comedy in its purest form?

Well, folks, by playing it. Loudly. On my badass stereo behind a closed and locked door.

Stereotypical Nerd Boy knew when Frat Dude would be coming home, so we gathered the group of us in my dorm room and listened to it over and over, laughing our asses off.

And home he came, right on schedule.

How did we know? Because he started pounding on my door, yelling “What the fuck are you guys doing?!”

We laughed even louder.

And he pounded harder.

And busted open my locked door.

In an instant, Keith was gone. He had been sitting in the chair closest to the door, but when we looked over in surprise at the sound of the door being forced open in rage, Keith was missing.

Keith was on his ass in the hallway about to get his ass kicked by a guy nearly a foot taller than him.

With the music still blasting out of my speakers and now filling the hallway, I tried reasoning with the guy. The guy who was about to kick my friend’s ass for laughing at his horrific display of musical ineptitude. The guy who just busted open a locked door.

And somehow I did it.

Somehow I managed to convince him that we weren’t laughing at the song. I convinced him that we LIKED the song and had just been laughing at something else.

I’m going to go ahead and repeat that again…I convinced him that we liked the song and had just been laughing at something else.

I should have become an actor. I said all that with a straight face. With the song playing rather loudly in the background.

Eat that Keanu Reeves. That’s right, Keanu….”Whoa”

What’s even more amazing? He just walked away.

No questions about how we got it. No demands to delete it. Nothing.

But then we realized that my valiant efforts to prevent Keith’s ass-kicking left us in a weird quandary. He thought we liked the song. Obviously he wasn’t too embarrassed by the song. So how do we continue to use it against him?

It was back to the drawing board. After all, this guy was getting laid and we weren’t. That was plenty enough motivation to continue on our quest.

After a little more deliberation we decided that all we needed to do was amplify things a bit, so to speak. So we pulled an Emeril and kicked it up a notch.

We continued to play the song loudly with our doors open, and volunteered the name and room number of the “artist” to any and all people who found it amusing while passing by. In other words, everybody.

After a while that got old, so we kicked it up another notch. We noticed him hanging out with a few of his buddies and several potential bed-buddies in the courtyard outside the dorm. So what did we do? Aimed the speakers out the window and cranked it up, of course!

Laughs were had by everyone. Except him.

I think that’s around the time he started getting suspicious of our intentions. Maybe his buddies made fun of him. Or worse, perhaps the ladies (and I use that term quite loosely).

Yeah, he started getting agitated when we played it. Not to the point of violence again, but we could tell it was working.

Everything was going as planned and it was time for the final stage. The ultimate in notch-kicking-upping. The money shot.

Keith and I made the trek across campus to the small building and made our way up the stairs. We sat down in the tiny room and got ready for the grand finale. We knew that everyone else had already done their parts, spreading the word around to as many people as they could. Everyone knew…9:15pm. Stereotypical Nerd Boy had made sure that Frat Dude was going to be in the dorm room. It was a go.

9:00 rolled around and Keith and I got to work. We started out talking about some of the recent sports news and then moved on to some other topics.

Then, at 9:15, we popped in the CD. That wonderfully horrible noise was traveling through the wires, up to the roof, and out. Out of the broadcast antenna of the college radio station, through the airwaves, into radios around the campus, and out their speakers.

Approximately 25 times over the next few hours.

He moved out a few weeks later.