Back in fall 2010 I was a third year ChBE student at Georgia Tech. That same fall I moved into the North Avenue Apartments, specially the North Ave South building on the sixth floor. I was in a six person apartment with four friends and one rando. Specifically this apartment:
Now our apartment over looked the bus stops in the turnaround area or whatever it was called. Atlanta not being the safest city, there were gates to keep non-residents out.
Now, since you had to be a resident, not everyone’s buzzcard would allow them to pass through the turnstile. If you’re not an alumni of Georgia Tech and are wondering what a buzzcard is, it was what we called our student IDs. Here’s mine:
So in order to let people into the building, you had to walk down there and use your buzzcard to let people in. We did this for a while, until one of my roommates was like this is stupid, I don’t want to have to go up and down 6 stories to let people in. So he came up with a better method. Since as previously mentioned our apartment over looked the bus stop, he came up with an idea.
He had a nalgene bottle lying around and since it’s supposed to be almost indestructible, he figured a 6 story drop wasn’t going to harm it. So one day he decided to try his theory out; he put his buzzcard in the nalgene and dropped it out the window. Did it break? Nope.
For the duration of the time we lived there, me only for one more semester, him for another 1.5 years, we would put a buzzcard into the nalgene, open the window, yell “don’t catch it,” and then drop the nalgene. It was coming at you decently fast so the most prudent course of action was to let it bounce.
Leave it to some engineers to figure out a lazy way to let people into our apartment.