I have a story to relay for you, Tumblr. About life, about perseverance, about sticking it to the man, and about super cool secret passageways.
In the late 70s/early 80s, Illinois State built a brand new dorm building where the rooms all had two closets, one on each side wall. But because they built the dorm on the cheap, the backs of the closets didn’t have real walls, only thin pieces of pressboard. That was all that was separated one dorm room from the next.
Once students figured this out, they cut big holes in the pressboard so that you could get to the adjoining dorm room by opening the closet door and scooting through the hole in the back wall.
They did this in room after room, until they had effectively built a huge secret passageway connecting every single dorm room on the floor.
The creation of this secret passageway led, almost immediately, to a culture of endless, enormous, authority-proof dorm parties. As soon as anybody knocked on the door or the party room, everybody could bail through the closets and be seven doors down the hall by the time the R.A. or campus security were let in. Or they would keep all the alcohol and what-not in one room, and have all the people in the next. So even when the R.A.s KNEW there was a ginormous party happening, they couldn’t do jack shit about it. It was total non-stop chaos.
Some of the bigger hooligans would commit all manner of mischief on campus, and then high-tail to this dorm building, knowing that once they were safely inside any room, there was no way the cops could ever find them.
Every summer, the school would replace the ripped out pressboard with sturdier and sturdier material. But students just got stronger saws, and kept rebuilding the secret passageways, year after year.
Eventually, only a few years after they built it, the school gave up and tore the whole building down.
