The Geeks of Allen

Through my last several years of high school, I had few strong friends, but amongst them were George Gruschow and Andrew Nicholson. I eventually asked Andy to live with me when we started at UIUC; because I asked first, he agreed. After some maneuvering involving Andy's sister, we all got accepted into Allen, and went about our lives...

Andy and I were assigned to Room 262, just on the end of 2C, a mostly Freshman floor that we were well-suited to. We spent a couple of hours unpacking, making desks, figuring out where our computers were going to go, and so forth; then we had George come down, telling us about the wonders of 4N (stuff like "there's a guy wandering around in a dress!" and such - he was truly impressed). Still, he wanted to hang around in our room, and so we gave him a space to put a computer and room for a chair...

Over the next few weeks, several things grew apparent. One: George hated his roommate, Todd, with a passion, and therefore was going to spend as much time as possible in our room. Two: me and Andy didn't mind at all. Three: we were all incredibly anti-social geeks. And four: the rest of our floor was even more anti-social than us, as proven by the fact that within days people were hanging out in our room anyway...

It was an interesting year for the bunch of us. I was the only one that really left the room; still, I spent a few hours a day in front of my computer or watching television, all the while talking with the hordes of people visiting us for no better reason than that we had a few good video games to play. George would go upstairs every night and come back the next morning, never really intruding on anything but always there anyway. Me and Andy would talk for a half hour after everybody had left every night, so we were actually able to plan strategies for how to deal with the various people that would annoy us. And we all made a bunch of floor friends that we really didn't act much like... Eventually, George moved in with Jay (a kid down the hall) after he had finally had it with Todd, and things got even a bit more simple...

Then the new year came.

Early on in the previous year, we had all decided that we needed a bigger room. The building's quads weren't available, but there was a fair chance that we could get a triple; because George still technically lived on 4N, we were able to worm our way into that space, plus the room next door so that we could also fit Harf, another friend from high school that was in the class below us but wanted to live with us anyway. To make it work, we needed another person; we chose George Harris, another kid from down the hall whose roommate had flunked out and whom had had plenty of amusing conversations with us over the semester. We split up into the two rooms, me with Harf and Andy in one room and the Georges in the other, and went about our business. Unfortunately, this time it didn't work.

It's not that I didn't enjoy living with Harf and Andy (and George G, who again pretty much stayed in the room all the time). It was just that I couldn't stand the new dynamic - the complete lack of sleep. There was always someone up in the triple, no matter the hour, and it began to get to me; plus, there was the constant verbal warfare inherent in our crowd, acceptable when it would go away at night but this didn't happen anymore. By the end of the semester, I had tired of it; I decided to move into the room next door, trading with George G, where I could get some sleep and actually talk about stuff. Soon thereafter, I moved out of there too, having overestimated my ability to live with George Harris, and slept in the commons for a couple of days before being taken in by Mike Poszgay...

A few fun facts about the Geeks: