update: a lot has happened in the past two days
I continued talking with people around campus. The idea that the entire campus was booked minus one bed seemed as ludicrous to them as it did to me, but they didn't know where any empty rooms would be. I confronted the guy who told me the rumor of an empty room in one of the buildings that were particularly close to classes (a coveted spot) and asked him about where he had heard it. He was unsure but encouraged me to check the building out for myself.
I called my mom to check-up because, after the massive hit to my grades last semester, she wanted to know how I was doing. I told her about my situation and about everything I had learned so far from both the housing services and students. Upon hearing what I had done up to this point, she told me that I shouldn't accept getting just enough to "fix" my room (which is getting worse by the day, along with my sleep deprivation) and I should continue to push for a permanent fix to ALL the problems with the room, which was the original idea I had: a room switch. Being a lawyer and an old-school Democrat, she did not feel there was any validity to what the housing services were telling me. In fact, she believed they were engaging in red tape; instead of trying to fix my problem for good, they were attempting to discourage me from switching rooms by bouncing me between different people, from housing to the community director to the RA back to the community director, in order to tire me out, making me take the AC unit and go away. Long story short, we laid out the battle plan over the next couple of days, and I'm going to have that first meeting with the community director tomorrow, where I'm going to be blunt with what I want and keep pushing how urgent of an issue this is and how I can't wait until 9/11 to switch.
Then, it got... interesting.
I had always wanted to check the dorm with the rumored empty room, to see if it was true. If it was false, I would know that the word of the students wasn't as accurate as I thought. So today, I went to the dorm and took a tour. I believe I found it. While not on the first floor of the building, like he had said, after walking through all five floors, scanning every door, I came across a room with no name on the door on the fifth floor. No name on the door isn't the best indicator of whether a room is occupied or not, I know, but it still raised questions. Being up on the hill, I decided to check out the other two dorms.
I now have reasonable suspicion that housing is engaging in red-tape-style business.
The first dorm I visited was objectively the best on campus, next to senior living spaces. It is the one space coveted by sophomores more than any other space on the entire list. It was completely gutted and renovated a couple of years ago. Environmentally-friendly. Fast access to classes. Massive common rooms with billiards and video games. PRIVATE BATHROOMS. Aesthetically, the difference between my current dorm and this dorm is the difference between the Undead Burg and Anor Londo. Everyone who told me that they didn't believe campus was packed had at least agreed that this dorm was locked the forget down.
I found two rooms on the third floor, TWO, with absolutely NO names on the door. At all.
I visited the next dorm, which was identical to the one with the supposed vacancy. I started on the bottom floor, and was amazed to see that out of the 12 or so rooms on that floor, there were only three with names on them. Yeah, you might say the RA just didn't write names on any of the rooms I mentioned and that they're actually occupied, but I find it hard to believe that they went and wrote names on all the other doors and then gave up on the ones I mentioned. I think I might really be onto something here. Then again, I didn't knock on any of the doors (I didn't want to disturb people because it was late in the afternoon and they'd be doing HW), so we'll see what happens.
