Shaft Me, Baby

Random Hall was an apartment building in a previous life, and at that time the recognized way to get air to rooms on the inside of a building was to build giant air shafts, open to the sky, barrelling straight down through the building itself. These days, complex ventilation systems can be used to prevent people from suffocating, but in those good old days, they knew that shafts were much cooler.

Since Random is its lovable old bipartite self, each of the two symmetical halves has its own shafts. The "3" and "4" rooms on each floor have windows onto the shaft, and so if you look down each shaft you can see windowsill plants, air conditioners, and people tooling, if it's late enough at night. But the similarities between the one shaft and the other stop there.

The 290 side shaft

The shaft from the half of the building that officially lives at 290 Mass Ave is a fairly clean shaft. At the bottom of the long air shaft is a bed of gravel, and off of the bottom leads an iron gate which lets air flow up the shaft from behind Random. It's a quiet shaft, and people who live on this shaft appreciate that.

The 282 side shaft

The shaft on the 282 side has a decidedly different character. Long ago, in prehistoric days, a caveperson was drinking Snapple lemonade on the roof, and when finished, placed the bottle on the railing that surrounds the shaft. Suddenly, a wooly mammoth stomped its way down Mass Ave, and the entire dorm shook. The bottle toppled and fell down the long shaft to explode at the bottom of the shaft in a shower of glass. The caveperson was mortified, until the sound of the bottle was remembered; a wonderful sound.

Since then, it has been a Random tradition to drop shatterable items down the shaft, usually at night, usually from the very top of the shaft at the roof. People have shafted hard drives (the dang things don't break!), monitors, and a microwave is on its way. The most common item to shaft is a glass bottle, often filled with water. There are only a few rules to obey in the Eternal Codex of Shafting:

NEVER shaft anything organic.
Do not shaft entire recycling bins of glass bottles; in general, shaft only bottles you finished.
Shaft only in the 282 shaft.
Do not shaft Course 6 students (not technically organic, but they still smell bad)

So come to Random, and you too can shaft away to your heart's content!