After I split up with my girlfriend Rachel, I moved back into the dormitories on campus. The University of Alaska Fairbanks has two sets of dormitories: the upper campus and the lower campus. The upper campus had three connected towers, each I think six or eight floors. The lower campus had multiple three or four story buildings, but they were all separated. Up to this point, I had always lived in one of the lower campus dorms (the Nerland building, or “Nerdland”, as it was called.) But in the summer, they closed the lower campus dorms, and so all students were housed in the upper campus.
I was assigned to a room that already had one of the basketball players in it. He and I did not get along, despite my love for basketball. He was rude and unfriendly from the first day. We tried to coexist, but it did not go well. One day, I was listening to some music (Peter Gabriel) at a reasonable volume, and he demanded I turn it off. After spending much of the summer listening to his music, I refused. He insisted, and I told him to fuck off. This caused him to grab me by the throat, choke me, and threaten to kill me in my sleep.
I immediately went to the resident assistant (RA) and told him what happened. There were claw marks still on my neck, so it was obvious I was telling the truth. In response, the university… moved my roommate to another room. No further consequences ever occurred. Not exactly a profile in courage for the university — and this is for a school that had a losing record in Division II basketball. It’s true that athletics are sometimes more important to universities than the students. But the end result did mean that I had a room to myself for the rest of the summer.
I was still working for the University network and computer services group (UACS), but I had moved over to a new Macintosh computer lab in a different building. I helped organize and set up all of the Macs, and my boss, Jo Knox, basically left the administration of the lab to me. I installed software that would automatically wipe all of the Macs at the end of the night and reset them back to a base hard drive image every day. Students, of course, had to bring in a floppy disc to store all of their files, because anything saved on the Mac would be wiped every night.
I even wrote a program that would show me, at the administrator’s desk, what applications everyone were running on the Macs, which would allow me to catch people who were trying to play games. (It was allowed, when there were free computers, but we often had a waiting list.) In the weekend evenings, my friends and I would sometimes assemble in the lab to play networked games like Marathon, Descent or Bolo.
The cafeteria was closed during the summer, so unless I wanted to eat at the burger place or pizza place on campus, I had to walk off-campus. Or bike — a friend, Tina, let me borrow her bicycle from time to time, which let me get a lot further. Fairbanks is pretty spread out, and so it’s not a very walkable town.
I also signed up in 1994 to start hosting a radio show on 103.9FM KSUA, the university’s radio station. (Now it’s 91.5FM, but the offices in this video look virtually identical to the way they did when I was there.) I played a bunch of grunge back in the day, but I always started my show with the same song: If I Only Had A Brain, by MC 900 Ft Jesus. (It was kind of my unofficial anthem; I actually still have all the lyrics memorized.) My ex-girlfriend Rachel also had a show on KSUA that year, so I got to wake up every morning to the sound of my ex and her friends on the radio.
I think this was the summer I was actually healthiest and in the best shape, largely due to, well, all the walking. And so it was that I went into my fourth year of college with about 2 years worth of accrued school credits, and it was an important and eventful one…
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