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Cockroaches Protest Unlivable Dorm Conditions

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Photo by Tobin / CC BY-SA 2.0

Three-month-old cockroach David was extremely excited to come to Penn. He couldn’t wait to eat Wawa mac & cheese leftovers every Friday night or live in the highly-acclaimed Quad freshman dormitory and meet tons of new people and pests alike.

Brown-banned David thought that college would be full of other brilliant cockroaches and a human to make a mess all the time and keep him alive and well-fed. Everything seemed to be going according to plan. He was making new friends, eating good, and hiding well from the eyes of his human roommate. But, it all changed at the end of September, when his human roommate Brian went from just the right amount of messy to, as David described it, a “Kafka novel, but worse.”

Each day, he spends hours trying to make his way through the giant pile of laundry and stolen Svedka. After a while, though, he has no choice but to give up. 

“I hate the Quad," he declared. 

In fact, in a poll surveying 24 of these nocturnal pests, all agreed that the Quad is not all it is hyped up to be. “It just makes me sad,” said Natasha, a 9-month-old from the floor bathroom’s shower drain. “I came in with such high hopes. How can I bring my egg deposits into a dirty dorm like this?”

The poor Quad conditions have caused a dramatic migration of cockroaches to the Hill dining hall. “It’s about time we reap some of the benefits of the renovation too,” one said.

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