I hate cold showers. I remember every summer, racing my siblings back to the house from the pool, each trying to beat the other for the first shower. We only had one shower, and with two siblings, someone always got stuck with the cold water. This was exactly what I thought was going on here.
I began to hate and dread when I showered. Each day after I got out of the shower, I was freezing and wouldn’t regain any warmth until the next morning. I thought that I was just showering at the wrong times, so I began to experiment with it. I kept a mental note of when I showered and when it was coldest. I tried every time you could think of. I showered before everyone woke up at seven, after most people were asleep at two, and every hour in between them. Whenever everyone was likely eating dinner, or when people were likely in class, I was showering. I tried so hard, and the water just kept getting colder. It eventually got to the point where I was so cold that my skin turned red, and any scars or marks I had turned purple. I would come back into my room and bundle myself in blankets on top of blankets as I spoke to my roommate about how cold the water was. To be quite frank, some tears were in fact shed.
After a bad day and one particularly cold shower, I called my mom, who is—for lack of better words—a Karen. She was up in arms because I had yet to say anything, but the whole time I had thought that it was just me and my roommate who favor really hot showers. A quick discussion with my teammates in my ENGR 111 lab made me realize that it was not just me. Turns out it had happened in Humphreys Hall a few months ago, and it was fixed in a matter of days after they said something. The residents of the second floor of Davis Hall were not so lucky.
It took two weeks for me to finally realize that the water hitting my skin was not meant to be nearly as cold as it was. After hearing about what my groupmates had said and feeling slightly embarrassed about how long it took for me to say something, I messaged my RA. Turns out RAs have their own bathrooms. I’m not sure why, but this had never occurred to me. She said that her water had been cold a few times but never anything serious. She then posted in our floor’s Slack channel that everyone had been having the same issue.
Two days later, I went for my shower, dreading the cold water to come, when it actually got so hot that there was steam. That was one of the best showers I have had purely because of the wonderful warm water. Please take my story as a precautionary tale, and just tell your RA if there’s any issue. It will be better than weeks of cold water, trust me.
