Pretend you're a College freshman, What Would You Do?

[MrsPete]

- and she didn't say she didn't make attempts to rectify it prior to calling, yet poster after poster assumed she didn't. That was my point. This is a huge pet peeve of mine on the DIS. People don't give the "benefit of the doubt."

Nope, doesn't hold water. When someone says, "This happened", the reader cannot be expected to guess all the things that might've happened prior to the escalation of the event. If we're supposed to speculate on things that we aren't told, we might as easily guess that the girl herself had had a boyfriend "sleep over" a time or two, which gave the roommate the idea that it was an okay concept. Or we might've guessed that the roommate asked whether this was okay, and the cousin said, "Yes", thinking it was a one-time thing to help him out . . . and then it became permanant. The point is that if we're supposed to read between the lines, we might well read incorrectly. We can't know what we aren't told.

get her stuff out of there asap! when you piss off girls, they're vicious! i wouldn't be surprised for your cousin to come to her dorm and find her stuff destroyed or stolen.

Yeah, this is VERY LIKELY. It'd be wise for her to go ahead and box up her stuff and ask dorm friends to store 1-2 boxes each for her, put as much as possible in her trunk (if she has a car on campus), ask her mom to come pick up some boxes . . . keep just the necessities of life nearby.

Obviously she should watch after her valuables -- laptop, ipod, money -- but she should also safeguard her textbooks. If the roommate really wanted to screw her over, she could sell the textbooks back to the bookstore for cash, which would leave the OP's cousin unable to study for exams and unable to do anything about it.

With any luck, the roommate will've realized that she's been caught, and she'll exit the situation with a little dignity . . . but she hasn't showed much consideration or class thusfar.

If I had a roommate like this every time they were "sleeping" I would stand at the foot of their bed and applaud loudly. If it turned into a contest of who could make the other more uncomfortable I would win every time .

I forget where I heard this, but I heard that if your college roommate has a "sleepover", you're supposed to get up, turn the lights on and start vaccuming. I never personally had cause to do this, but it sounds like a real mood killer. I can't imagine you'd have to do it twice.

It's quite possible there simply is no other space on campus... She's lucky she can change at the semester, though!

Granted, I've been out of college for a good 20 years, but when I was a student, the dorms were always PACKED FULL in fall semester. Things opened up a bit in spring semester as the "one semester wonders" headed home and some students moved off campus to apartments. Typically there was no such thing as moving during fall semester -- not unless you knew someone who wanted to switch spots with you, and I'd be surprised if anyone wanted to transfer into this particular room!

 

[disykat]

Nope, doesn't hold water. When someone says, "This happened", the reader cannot be expected to guess all the things that might've happened prior to the escalation of the event. If we're supposed to speculate on things that we aren't told, we might as easily guess that the girl herself had had a boyfriend "sleep over" a time or two, which gave the roommate the idea that it was an okay concept. Or we might've guessed that the roommate asked whether this was okay, and the cousin said, "Yes", thinking it was a one-time thing to help him out . . . and then it became permanant. The point is that if we're supposed to read between the lines, we might well read incorrectly. We can't know what we aren't told. Yeah, this is VERY LIKELY. "

On this we agree. No reason to speculate that the girl did nothing until her mother called.