Golf Darts

Our dorm building had a square footprint. In the very middle were three elevators serving the dorm rooms which were all positioned along the edges of the building. In between the elevators and the rooms was a square hallway that ran in a loop.

This was to be our arena for Golf Darts, a sport we invented to aid our more scholarly pursuit – procrastination.

On one door we set up a target. The goal was to go around the hallway, arrive back at the target and hit it.

Darts were thrown at walls. Hitting the same wall twice in a row incurred a two stroke penalty. So did hitting the water (the floor).

The game was fun, but the most fun part may have been the danger we brought to the floor. As we went around the hallway people would exit their dorms only to be greeted by darts whizzing past their faces.

Most of them would be intrigued by the spectacle and would follow the ever growing pack of spectators following us around the circuit.

The one problem was the doors. At the end of each side of the square hallway was a door, which became a popular target. After playing for an hour or two they had become littered with holes concentrated in one area. It looked really bad.

Terry pounded a long shot into a wall. He missed the door, but also avoided the dreaded carpet by half a foot. He continued down the hall and I wound up to throw.

Just as I was about to release the dart, the door to the stairwell in front of me opened up. It was our RA.

She looked at me, and then at the crowd behind me.

“Tynan… what are you doing?”

“Oh… just hanging out.”

She gave me a suspicious look. My poker face wasn’t all that convincing.

“…. and playing golf darts.”

She turned around and saw Terry’s dart stuck in the wall. I looked behind me because no one else seemed to be chiming in. They were gone, hiding in dorm rooms. I wanted to escape too, but it was too late.

She took the dart, shook her head, and started to leave when something else caught her eye.

The door full of dart holes.

“Oh no. This is too much. I try to be cool with you guys and cut you some slack, but you have destroyed the door. I have to write you up. I have no choice.”

She left.

We didn’t want to face the wrath of the building manager again. He had recently forced us to take down a porch light we installed in the hallway as well as a large brass knocker on our door. To try to remedy the situation I set up a meeting with him, which ended with him standing over his desk, face beet red, yelling at me.

And that wasn’t our only encounter. He had also confiscated my lock picking gun earlier, and refused to return it.

So we did what any unreasonable group of college kids would do. We chipped off a corner of the door and headed to home depot.

We used the corner of the door to match the color of the paint. We bought rollers, tape, putty and a putty knife.

The work took longer than we expected, but maybe that shouldn’t come as a huge surprise since none of us had ever repaired a door. By the end the two doors we painted actually looked better than they did before we destroyed them.

Our RA was equally impressed.

“Oh my god! I can’t believe what a good job you guys did. I went into the RA office and tore up the report I wrote about you.”

Mission accomplished.