Dayton Diary: Marycrest nights

Marycrest nights

A jarring beeping woke me up for the fifth time in three days, and classes hadn’t even started yet. I had just moved into Marycrest, my first-year residence hall, but walking down seven flights of stairs was getting tedious.

Fire alarms became less frequent as the year went on, but at the beginning we could have two or three per night. Marycrest’s fire alarms seemed to be set off by anything — steam from hair straightening, mist from air fresheners and maybe even particles from spray-on deodorant.

One night in August we had two fire alarms, the second being an hour-long alarm. Exhausted from the lack of sleep the night before, we all were annoyed when we had yet another false alarm the next night. As soon as we got back inside, it went off for a second time. I was extremely irritated at that point.

But it turned out to be one of my most memorable experiences.

As I got outside, I burst out laughing: My fellow residents had managed to bring out not only music speakers but a very large couch from their rooms! While we waited for the alarm to subside, hundreds of us jumped and sang to quintessential American tunes like "YMCA," "Sweet Caroline" and "Take Me Home, Country Roads" — at 1 a.m.

Although we hadn’t had much time before that to get to know each other, we turned our collective inconvenience into an unshakeable bond.

Dayton Diary is a series of short, personal UD stories: quirky encounters, light-hearted moments or heart-warming snippets. Why not write one yourself and send it (up to 300 words) to magazine@udayton.edu. Put Dayton Diary in the subject line