For many folk, college is a dream come true. Studying your favourite subjects for three or more years? Living freely, away from your parents and hometown, amongst other like-minded people through that time? With unlimited parties and nights out, new friends and romantic relationships aplenty? It’s no wonder that so many people are keen to get their degree – for these reasons as well as the lifelong career implications, of course.

However, not everyone’s college experience is the idealised time they’d hoped for. Because a lot of the enjoyment of college is down to the people that you live with. If they’re generally just not your people then sure, you can find other roommates for next year, and just hang out with your friends in the meantime. But if you strike truly unlucky, you might end up with roommates who make your life quite unpleasant, or who are a danger to be around.

Thankfully for the guy in this story, things weren’t quite that dire. But he did have a lot of grievances about his roommate, and eventually one thing pushed him over the edge, leading him to conduct a psychological experiment on him in secret.

And the results were unprecedented.

Read on to find out what happened.

I secretly trained my roommate to not respond to his morning alarms

I was a senior in college, and my roommate was a sophomore but it was his first time living in a dorm.

He’d been a pretty lousy roommate, constantly left the room a mess, left his stuff on my side of the room and on my bed, stole my alcohol, used my things without permission, never cleaned up my dishes after he used them, and a bunch of other stuff.

I confronted him about all these issues on several occasions, and got the Resident Advisor involved with the alcohol stealing issue because at the time he was under 21.

But things still continued anyways.

And things just kept getting worse with this roommate.

He asked me once if it was okay if his girl spent the night, which I said no.

We were in the middle of a pandemic, plus that’s especially weird if I was there.

I also had to wake up every day at 8am for work, which he knew, and he would stay up until 2am playing video games some nights.

Not to mention, he would set like ten alarms in the morning with a bunch of different alarm tones.

So eventually, this roommate decided to take action.

I hit a breaking point and decided to do something cruel.

Every morning when I woke up, I’d observe his alarm pattern and how he’d respond. He had several alarms that he’d ignore, all with the same sound.

He had a couple half-hour alarms that had a unique sound (also ignored), and then the final alarm had its own sound too. All of them were default iPhone sounds.

So his brain had been trained to this alarm pattern for a while, I’d assumed. So I started step one of the punishment: set up a sequence of alarms on my phone, identical to his sequence, but an hour earlier.

Read on to find out how this cunning plan worked.

He responded to my alarms the exact same way he’d respond to his own. I kept this up for a week, and his brain was eventually re-trained to sleep through double the amount of alarms as before.

Then, phase two kicked in: random inconsistencies in my alarm pattern. Some days I’d play all the alarms, while other days I’d only play one that his brain was trained to ignore. That way, his brain expected to sleep through like twenty alarms and only ever heard eleven.

He slept through his alarm at least four times in two weeks.

Eventually he finally changed his alarm pattern so he’d only have one alarm, and he no longer had the energy to stay up until 2am.

Sure, this was kind of a devious plan, but it really worked.

And, in a way, it probably benefited both roommates to just have the one alarm each.

You could even say that he did his roommate a favour.

If you enjoyed this post, check out this story about a landlord who learned the hard way not to try to keep a security deposit he should have paid.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit made of this.

This person thought he’d done a great job to train his roommate.

While others simply did not understand the logic behind multiple alarms.

Meanwhile, this Redditor thought he should have taken things even further.

The truth is that if he’d gone any further, the already morally dubious revenge plot would have become nothing short of cruel. However, it’s understandable that after a year of living with a terrible roommate he might want to get his revenge somehow, and hopefully this revenge felt sweet enough – whilst also actually being beneficial to the roommate arrangement.

Because if anything, given the experiment actually made the roommate a better person, this revenge plot actually made both of their lives better. After all, who wants to be woken up by loads of alarms anyway?

However, conducting psychological experiments on people who don’t know they’re participants isn’t actually ethical – but bringing extra people into a home during a Covid lockdown whilst also torturing your roommate with multiple alarms, lots of mess, and literally stealing his alcohol? Well, those things are arguably worse, falling distinctly within the low-level criminality territory.

Both of these guys must have been pleased when the year was over.