By Kendall Lowery ’22
Staff Writer
Are you fed up with explicitly labeling and securing your food items, only to find them missing the next day?
Are you sick of your peers coming into your dorm room and stealing your food and clothing?
Are you tired of mysteriously finding your birthday cakes partially eaten by unknown individuals, who, for all you know, could have a highly contagious strain of oral herpes?
There has been a group of thieves running rampant on Scripps campus for quite some time; this dilemma has inspired me to compile a guide of some steps that may be taken in order to avoid losing your food or clothing to these masked bandits.
- Place your food into a labeled bag. Secure this bag in a padlocked box and douse it with gorilla glue before placing it at the very back of the communal fridge. Make sure to swallow the lock’s sole key to ensure that you keep it on your person at all times.
- Always finish your birthday cake on the actual date of your birth (or, better yet, the week prior). Every thief knows that as soon as the clock strikes twelve, all birthday privileges are revoked and that dessert is fair game to anyone who happens upon it.
- Avoid all communal fridges unless you want to rid yourself of your food. Freezer=FREEzer. ReFREEgerator. Ice cream, mochi, and other frozen foods are post-college luxuries.
- Anything placed on either kitchen or laundry room drying racks is immediately placed under “finders keepers” rules. Leaving your clothing, pots, and pans to dry in a communal setting automatically sends a notification to 5C For Sale/For Free with the latitude and longitude of your item, which then changes ownership to the first student that reaches those coordinates. Remain active and vigilant on Facebook in order to intercept these alerts and to reclaim your items if necessary.
- In order to prevent people from entering your room and taking clothing or snacks, enclose the entrance to your dorm room with barbed wire fencing as a precautionary measure.
- If your items are taken, a post on social media oftentimes goes unanswered, but may lead to surprising perks: “I had two pairs of jeans stolen from the laundry room and my favorite T-shirt I won in a beer pong tournament. Strangely, after posting on the [Facebook] page, the shirt was returned with a stain on it… Not only was the shirt returned–a whole basket of stolen laundry from random students (including the shirt) was placed in our room.” recounted Scripps student Gretta Richardson ’19. What a deal!
- Your vigilant presence does not guarantee the safety of your belongings; students have witnessed the theft and consumption of their pizza firsthand.
- Set up a clandestine security camera to guard your clothing while it’s washing; a resourceful thief has been able to override washer locking mechanisms to steal 8 pairs of leggings mid-cycle.
- Throw thieves off their rhythm by storing your lingerie in the fridge and your food in the dryer. My frozen peas have never been safer– or cleaner.
- Like any good Scripps student, reject the capitalist conception of ownership; if you don’t possess anything, nothing can be stolen from you.
