My freshman year I was in a two room triple with two guys who were inclined to stay up late and sleep in. We had one room with the three beds, and the other for our desks, visitors, etc. Spring term I had a very tough schedule: maximum credits, two lab classes, intensive foreign language studies, varsity track team, and student work-study. I was getting up early to run track practice on lab days, getting pretty tired, and my roomies were making a lot of noise so that I couldn’t get to sleep at night. Commenting on this wasn’t having an effect.

I started setting my alarm to go off 5 minutes after I had to be out of the room, so that one of them would need to wake up enough to get up and cross the room to turn it off. After two or three days of this one of the guys commented that my alarm had been going off after I had left, to which I replied, “Yeah, I know.” He got a stunned look on his face for a moment, then asked if they were being a little loud in the evenings, to which I answered in the affirmative. Things were a lot better after that,