The Great Broken Glass Laundry Caper

David Stiefel Eng 250 Fox, 10/12/06

The Great Broken-Glass Laundry Caper McNerney residents prove more than risk of revoked laundry privileges as case remains unsolved.

It would appear as though this is one set of problems that I fear will not go away. At this point, the title probably has someone curious. What exactly is this “caper” about anyway? Well, let’s briefly explore the history of the event. On Tuesday, October 3rd of 2006, around 9:15 PM, I left the laundry room for about forty-five minutes in an effort to get some dinner at Center Ice Café.

Perhaps it was meant as a bad omen; but this was also the night I also had a boil on my leg, as well as the night I ran out of dining dollars on my card. Most everyone in the McNerney hall was either thinking about their significant others(signified by an always-on cell phone), or their schoolwork, or the HIV workshop delivered earlier that evening at the Williams Auditorium by guest speaker Rebekkah Armstrong of Playboy fame. But as everyone seemed to be minding their own business in their respective fields, something very strange happened in the laundry room.

I came back around 10:04 PM, to discover a girl chatting away on a cell phone oblivious to the blight staring right at her. My laundry had four minutes remaining in the dryer. Someone had stolen my fabric softener. The worst of it was this: the glass to the window had been shattered in a spider-web fashion. Vandals had struck!

I immediately asked the girl in the room if she knew anything about the broken window. She was oblivious to all but the fact that there was a broken window. Studying the area of damage, I assessed that it was very likely someone very large and muscular, as well as drunk, had possibly elbowed or back-handed the window. It would have taken a large impact for a simple fist to cause that much damage, and there weren’t significant indentations to indicate a baseball bat. Who did it? What was the motive? Did the impact come from inside or outside the laundry room? Depending on the cause and degree of the impact, the glass shards on the floor outside could explain either way.

Unsure what else to do, I immediately called the situation to the attention of one of the residential assistants in the basement. His immediate first reaction was the understandable choice exclamatory. Before long, everyone in both halls had heard of some horrible breaking of the window. Within minutes, many of the residents on the first floor were coming up with their own choice exclamatories, accusing one another of breaking the window. Some were in jest, some were serious. Even I myself was accused, in spite having a very clear alibi.

On the 5th of October around 5:00 PM, the RA for the north end of the McNerney hall’s first floor called a meeting together, which consisted mostly of asking once again: “Who broke the f*in’ window?”

One would have hoped that something rational would have been discussed. Instead, exclamatory choice words were the tongue of the day. Accusations were all over. Threats of revoked laundry privileges were made known. A soap opera crew would have had a field day with the drama, which seemed to prove that in many ways, the McNerney residents were no more above the high school drama mentality than those they scolded in Brophy or other halls for this same supposed vice.

Even the RA’s seemed to be completely unable to control the situation. On the same October 5th, around 7:30 PM, I started the Facebook group known as “The Great Broken Glass Laundry Caper,” as a means for students who cared to gather to help solve the mystery. Yet, around noon or so on October 6th, the glass to the laundry room was replaced by higher-up management. Once there was no longer a broken window, nobody cared. The group on Facebook had only amassed five members in addition to me.

In all the great mystery movies and novels, there is a group of capable, self-appointed sleuths who can usually pinpoint a culprit. Yet, there was nothing but raw emotion and choice exclamatory flying loose in McNerney that week. And alas, the great mystery of the window vandal and fabric softener thief shall remain just that: a mystery.