University students can be really smart and creative. Not to mention, cunning.

In this story, these students had to think of an ingenious way to make their dorm room walls have the same color, or else be slapped with a huge fine.

Their solution?

Parodontax and paint.

Find out how.

You want everything the same color? Give me a day or two.

This was way back when I lived in a student dormitory in a city in The Netherlands.

This wasn’t a US-style dorm; each student had their own room, but we shared a shower, a toilet, and a kitchen. Between sixteen people.

Oh, joyful days.

The dorm needs renovation.

Anyhow, by the time I entered the flat, it was already thirty years old and falling to bits.

So, the Student Housing Dept decided to renovate the building, basically stripping it.

We all got replacement rooms and a sum of money to go away without making a fuss.

So far, all good.

Time to cover the holes.

Cue my neighbor’s exit.

By contract, we had to leave the room as we found it.

That meant seeing to it that all the power plugs worked, and filling up all the holes you’d made for hanging posters and lamps on the wall.

It had become something of a tradition to perform the latter task using toothpaste.

It was mainly laziness since proper toothpaste is a good deal more expensive than wall filler. Anyway, it’s what most of us did.

Uh oh! Now, here’s the problem…

Except that my neighbor brushed her teeth with Parodontax, which uses a sort of off-pink (adobe-ish) color of paste, and stupidly used said brand to fill the holes in her wall.

So come inspection time, the holes she had filled with it on a white wall stuck out like sore thumbs.

After about a week, she received a letter stating that she needed to make sure the walls were uniformly the same color, or face a 1000 guilder (about 800 euros in today’s money) fine, plus the loss of her 300-guilder deposit. Within three days.

This, in spite of the fact that the rooms would be demolished shortly after, and that the Student Housing Dept was very lax when they actually had to do any repairs.

OP and the friend had a bright idea.

After about three minutes of indignation, we threw together enough funds to visit the DIY store armed with a tube of Parodontax toothpaste, had a can of paint mixed with exactly that color, returned, and repainted the entire room (including everything in it) in solid Parodontax pink.

When the inspector showed up a week later, he just stood there flabbergasted, while my neighbor shoved him his own letter in his face, with the relevant sentence about uniformity indicated in yellow marker.

She never heard anything about it again.

Let’s see how other people reacted to this story.

Oh, wow! Couldn’t imagine what it would look like.

This user shares his personal thoughts.

Here’s what this user would have done.

This one loved the idea.

Apparently, 30 years is not that old, according to this user.

This is why you don’t threaten academically-driven students!

They’ll always find a way to one-up you.

If you thought that was an interesting story, check this one out about a man who created a points system for his inheritance, and a family friend ends up getting almost all of it.