This Is My Job

Life as an RA has been pretty good so far. The job is easy, and I haven't even ever had to deal with much more than telling people to shut up after quiet hours.

Enter this weekend.

I should've known it couldn't last. This weekend, I had to bust my first party, clean up my first vomit, and fix my first prank. All of these things were separate instances, which means that they take up even more time than if they had all been together. Things could have been a LOT worse, I'll admit that readily. I've heard of many a weekend that has had many times the number of incidents I had to deal with. Still, this weekend wasn't a lot of fun to deal with.

Busting the party went as well as it possibly could have. I had an experienced RA backing me up, and the residents were very cooperative. Still, I spent more than an hour of my Friday evening watching people poor alcohol down a drain and then writing about it. Yay.

Saturday night, I was going my 2:00 rounds, and I walked into one of the bathrooms and immediately felt something slippery. Great. Someone had vomited all over the place. A student was already in there trying to clean it up, but wasn't really equipped for the task. I told him I'd take care of it and sent him along. The building is equipped with these spill kits, which actually work very well for what they're supposed to do, so cleaning it up wasn't that bad. Still, it wasn't exactly pretty, and I'd rather have spent the time doing something else.

Then, as the group of people I'd been playing games with left the lobby, we found a prank someone had pulled sitting on the middle of the floor. I gotta hand it to the guys, it was a pretty harmless prank. They'd found a way to open the paper towel dispensers in the bathrooms and taken every single paper towel roll from the whole hall and used them to build a five foot pyramid in the middle of the hall. It looked like they'd spent some time figuring out how to do it quickly, so props for planning. Still, a fellow RA and myself would have had to go and replace them all, which would have taken a while. We didn't have the tool to open the paper towel dispensers, though, and neither of us felt like dealing with it, so we just threw all the paper towels in the office and figured people could do without for a few days.

Over the course of the weekend, I started to get frustrated, but then I stopped to think. The vast majority of the time (meaning the entirety of the year up til this point) has been pretty cushy. Sitting in the office for our duty hours is easy... most of the time we just play games. Staff meetings are actually fairly fun, and I don't mind going to them at all. Program ideas can be hard to come up with, but execution isn't all that hard and you usually get to do some fun stuff along with the residents who attend. Training is boring, but the same goes for any job.

So when things fall apart and I have to take care of them? Well, that's what they pay me for. I don't have much cause to get frustrated with a few things that go wrong, because the school compensates me (pretty darn well) for dealing with things that go wrong. I knew that coming in, too, so I don't have any excuse.

In the end, I decided that I'll gladly deal with the occasional mess or party, because the benefits of this job far outweigh the occasional crappy times. If nothing else, this weekend helped me gain a little perspective on that matter.