Moving Into Hell

1. I hate driving in Atlanta.  It puts me in the middle of a lot of stupid, careless, and rude people who are licensed to drive multi-ton, rapidly-moving, clumsy, armored, motorized deathtraps without consideration for anyone else on the road.  I know this is probably the same situation in your city as well but I guess you'd have to drive here to know what I'm talking about.
2. I don't have to buy furniture and the small rooms keep me from accumulating stuff.  (This has since been proven to be untrue.)
3. I'm 10 minutes walk from my cubicle.
4. It's low maintenance.

The Housing Department, in the grand tradition of a Georgia Tech Student Service, screwed up and when I went to get my room in the lottery, someone had already grabbed the damn room that I signed up for and said they were also moving in three of their friends.  Naturally, I was a little irritated at this change of events.  Some peripheral (and barely visible, if not nonexistent) wall damage might have resulted somewhere in the building later that night.

So at the time, the Resident Advisor taking room assignments suggested that I take this room on the 2nd floor that was designed for handicapped people and was a little larger than most of the rooms.  This was not appealing to me at the time because our apartment had a nice view and we were used to its quirks, but I took it so I'd have somewhere to live.  Of course, this meant packing and moving all my stuff, three floors down because of a bureaucratic stupidity.

This week, amidst frantic moving, I discovered:

1. It's the other room that's the larger one, not mine.  The guy who's living there currently will be there next year too.--Arghhhh!
2. The room I'm in is larger than my old room.  You can actually have 4 other people stand in the middle of the room without feeling cramped -- in my old room, you could fit myself and a small child and we'd both be fighting for oxygen.  Unfortunately, my room also overlooks the beautiful garbage dumpsters.  I plan to conduct some studies on rat behavior, just to get something out of it.  I recently discovered that there are three distinct rodent populations that occupy that area - rats, opossums, and squirrels.
3. The kitchen is larger than the one in the apartment but it's filthy.  Apparently, the community thing broke down and everyone refused to clean anything.  I'm toying with the idea of packing the floor with red Georgia clay to help level it and to stop my shoes from sticking to it.
4. My roommate on this side of the apartment (4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms) is the messy one.  He's also apparently of the "generate big mess and don't clean up" end of the bad roommate spectrum.  At least he keeps to himself. We cleaned off the tops of the refrigerator and the counters and threw away his green bread and mobile fruit.  Can't wait to get to the rest of the refrigerator -- should have taken an archaeology course at UCSD.
5. The air conditioner sort of works except that a roommate insists that the city air, warmed and humidified by the stupefyingly thick and torrid Georgia summers, is fresh air so the bastard opens the windows really wide periodically while the air conditioner is running.  He falls into my Achingly Stupid Roommate category.

(The ironic part of all this is that once everything was cleaned up and once the initial stupid roommates had left, this turned out to be one of the nicer apartments that I've had.  It's larger, quieter, and the kitchen's great.  Even my room has been a big plus.  Sometimes, things work out.)