Last night, while I was rather dopily cleaning up DArray at Sweet Hall, I took a break to fill up my water bottle at the bathrooms. Opening the door unleashed a strong, strong smell of the three-weeks-on-the-trail sort, at which I laughed mentally and benignly—after all, they do say that Sweet Hall is the armpit of campus, stuffed with bleary-eyed programmers who would be much behooved by seeing the light of day, quick. Then, I realized that one of the stall doors was closed, with sneakers tattered beyond hope and equally tattered pant legs peeking out from underneath it, and, for some stupid reason, panicked. I tried, in vain, to will the water to run faster; when my Nalgene was finally full, I bolted back to amy2.

A first thought was that the stereotype of Sweet Hall really did have some basis in truth. Heh. A split-second later, all of the complexities of the situation started materializing... the bizarre dichotomy of a homeless woman and a hundred-plus Unix workstations... the scores of geeks much too absorbed in our code to be aware of anything else under the very same roof... how clever a choice of refuge this woman made... I don't begrudge her some time in that bathroom, after all.