“I knew she would get the mail when she came home, so I put some more mail in the box and stuck the flier on top,” Rachel says.

When she came home, she began reading the flier out loud. Then she realized it was her face on the flier.

“She said, ‘Oh, it’s me,’” Rachel recalls. “‘Have you seen — me?’”

Although the roommates do not play favorites with whom they prank, it seems Jen is involved in most of the practical jokes.

Brian says he and Matt are on Team Face, a softball team, and bought some jerseys and hats together. A couple of the women thought it would be humorous to take their jerseys and hide them because they are on an opposing team that Team Face beat. They noticed the jerseys were gone and scoured the house looking for the stolen attire.

“It only took me like 30 seconds to find them,” Brian says. “I brought myself to her level and thought like her. Some were in the hall closet and some were in the lazy Susan in the kitchen.”

He did not let the women know when he found the jerseys and waited a few days to exact his revenge. Not until Jen got out of the shower did she realize all of the bras and panties had been abducted from her drawers. Brian says she had just washed clothes, so there were no dirty clothes in her room to wear.

“I just thought it was a way to get her back,” Brian says, “and it doesn’t get much better than that.”
Jen says she knew it was Brian and Matt and began her counterstrike.

“I stole all of their socks and boxers,” she says. “But they came home and found all of it, and I still didn’t have my stuff.”

Brian says he and Matt came home and toyed with her for while, making her do stuff around the house to get her underwear back. At 4 p.m., Jen finally put her foot down. She had to go to studio and did not want to go without her underwear. The roommates finally had mercy on their bra-less buddy.

who cleans all the mess?
In a house with six busy people, there is bound to be some clutter. Megan says the mess bothered her at first, but now she has adjusted to it and just works to do her part in the cleaning.

“The first day I came and scrubbed the whole bathroom upstairs,” Megan says.

The female roommates do cleaning when they are procrastinating, Brian says.

“Jen cleans the most because she procrastinates the most,” he adds. “They are the ones that usually have clutter because I keep most of my stuff in the basement.”

“We know each person is under stress, and we know to not take it personally,” Rachel says. “Sometimes it’s nice to yell at someone and know they understand you’re just stressed out.”

She remembers one time when everyone in the house was under the gun. They started a big pillow fight in the middle of the living room, and the roommates had a chance to forget their problems and have a good time, she says.

Matt says the group's’ playful pillow fight was one of his best memories in the house.

“It wasn’t anything that we planned, and it happened at the spur of the moment,” he says.

“Nothing was broken, and no one got hurt It was just something we all did together as a group to have fun.”

Matt says being in the same major is both good and bad for the house. The roommates get annoyed with each other because they are together on such a regular basis, but at the same time it sometimes makes life less difficult, he says.

“You know what they are going through,” Matt says, “and you know what to avoid doing or how to help them. We help each other study for tests and answer questions.”

Jen says she thinks having the same major helps them interact as a group. Everyone has a lot of work to finish, and there is no point in making the situation harder by fighting with each other, she says.

“We flat out say, ‘What’s wrong?’ because we know when people are upset,” Jen says. “We can then try to cheer them up. We’ve all known each other for four or five years, and it’s easy enough to know when someone is mad or upset.”

Brian says he does not let himself get stressed but knows the times in the semester when his roommates are under a lot of pressure.
Sometimes he goes in the studio and listens to them bicker and complain at each other, he says. Then he can see what incident spurred a conflict between two people and try to correct the situation.

“I can be an observant third party and help mend some of the bad blood between people when something happens,” Brian says.

good times on crain
When nothing is on television, and the people in the house are in need of some good entertainment, they do what any group of roommates might do: They play pranks on each other.

During finals week last year, Emily spent much of her time at her boyfriend Ryan’s house, so the group thought of a way they could play a joke on her when she came home. They scanned a missing persons flier, then used photo editing software to put Emily’s picture in place of the missing person.