Wednesday, December 08, 2010

'97 Prank

Thirteen years ago I was a sophomore in college (how sad to think it has been that long). I studied electrical engineering in Boulder. On campus, there was a ministry I was involved with that allowed me to meet some lifelong friends. A bunch of us decided to all live in the dorms so that we could hang out and meet new people. My dorm name was Baker Hall and I lived in a quad with 3 other girls. On the other end of the hall was a guys quad with 4 guys we knew well. We went to meals together and watched Football together and studied together. There was a lot of studying done by those guys. They were engineers and took their classes very serious. Often they stayed up until 2 or 3 AM finishing an assignment and what fueled their late night study sessions? Caffeine in the form of soda. These guys drank a lot of soda and produced a lot of empty soda cans.

Now it was 1997 and we were living in Boulder CO, capitol to granolaville and yumpies so all natural already existed in this town, but the whole Green thing had not caught fire in the rest of the country. CU was advanced for having all their recycling set up for every floor in every dorm to recycle newspapers and pop cans. It was a breeze to recycle because there were 2 trash cans in your dorm room, a brown one for regular trash and a blue one for recycleables.

Back to the engineer guys and their soda cans, well those pop cans went into the trash can every single time. I would remind them, "please put the cans in the blue can which is sitting 2" from the trash can," but they continue to put them in the trash. One civil engineer's excuse was that all the "recycled" stuff just ends up in the landfill after it gives us a warm and fuzzy feeling. Lazy! And I don't believe even back then Waste Management was only pretending to do something with the recycled cans.

So we started taking the cans out of their trash and collecting them in a huge trash bag in our room that we vowed to recycle on our own. My roommates and I were so dedicated that we began collecting cans from others in the residential hall. By December we had 2 huge garbage bags of cans.

December is finals time on college campuses. So now as students are studying hard I remember our wonderful prank. I believe David opened his door first to find all the soda cans stacked neatly in front of their door with a sign that read, "Please recycle." As the door was opened more the cans came tumbling down on the tile floor at 6 in the morning. Other guys down the hall heard the ruckus and came running. We were told that the cans just kept falling, the sound did not stop. So 2 months of collecting the cans and a whole night of taping string across the door and stacking the cans so they would fall into the room was so worth it. Such planning, so beautifully crafted. It was awesome!