I have been blessed with the opportunity (lets just say science experiment) to coexist and live in a dorm; with other people of both sexes. Well all women and one other person of the opposite sex...lets just give him the pseudo name "Black Stallion". Let's all feel sorry for him. Black Stallion has gone now and despite being a good spooner to most - he was loyal to his girlfriend back in Sydney; what a good boy. So I guess Tip Number One is 'make sure you are aware that the dorm is unisex before you move in' ...it can take you by surprise if you are on the toilet and then a man walks in and uses the cubical next to you. You never get use to that.
Also, it's important to be social, even if you usually aren't. No matter what, you must make an effort to get to know you dorm mates. This is paramount to survival because there are times when you want to talk the ear off someone and it doesn't really matter who...if people kind of know who you are this helps. You can't just walk out of your room after a month and a half and start up a conversation with someone who's never laid eyes on you other than in the shadows. That's just creepy. And people will start to speculate things about you. It's best to be in with the crowd and doing the speculating. Tip Number Two 'make friends, learn to speculate'.
You must be patient and peaceful with group television viewing. The important thing to remember here is that no one person owns the remote or has the right to choose the programs that everyone watches, but unfortunately there's always some control freak who seems to break this rule continually. My mantra is 'I can just go to my room when I've had enough of this bullshit; screw you guys I'm going to my room'. You will never get to watch what you want anyway, so don't expect to. If you are super cool like me you will go forth to the linen closet and find an old dormant mini TV and hook it up with a $20 Dick Smith set-box and DVD player and learn to hide away in your room for hours watching all your favorites from The English Patient to the TrueBlood series. Tip Number Three 'expect to share or become independent but risk being speculated about'.
Eating food is an important factor to survival no matter where you find yourself. It is interesting that I should bring this up...because it is the one issue I struggle with the most. Perhaps I shall learn something from my infinite wisdom. Firstly, everything is communal. You rely on others to be clean and tidy; and they're not. You trust that others won't use your milk; but they do. You compete for fridge space, freezer space, cupboard space and 'get the hell out of my space' space. It's a free for all and it's dangerous. Especially if you haven't been able to cook a decent meal in over a month because all you've got to work with is an over-sized splade, a rusty cheese grater and a deformed Tuppaware container. The trick here is to buy frozen meals, pray to God that the 'convection oven' doesn't cark it and pretend that you really just want to lose weight. Tip Number Four 'TV dinners are better than eating raw goanna and drinking squeezed elephant dung' (by a small margin).
Everyone is equally as pissed off as you are for being away from home and loved ones. It doesn't matter here if you are a nurse, midwife, physio, doctor or a lab technician - you are all here because you need the money, not because you want to be here. Everyone hates having to share the one shower, the two toilets, the one telly, the one washing machine. But it also binds you with a common hatred of all things institutional. Conversations often start with 'have you just finished work?' or 'when are you working next?'. Then you move on to how 'shitty and cold the weather is in Dubbo today', followed by...some good old fashioned 'speculating' about the new people moving into the still warm beds from the two physio's that just left. Tip Number Five 'One for all, and all for one', you can't escape it, and neither can anyone else - so just go with the flow.
And although you might be lonely and pining for your husband, boyfriend, lover or friend, it is also important to remember to enjoy the quiet times around the dorms when no one else is here to annoy you. Instead of wasting your time blogging, you should be raiding everyone else's food stuffs, using the toilet in peace, watching what you want on TV or just channel surfing mercilessly. So the last Tip of the day is Number Six 'when you find time to yourself, own the MF dorm like a Boss!'.
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