When we told our friends that we would take on the challenge of spending 24 hours in the 24-hour room, we kept getting asked, “Why?” That question, it seemed to us, missed the point. It was Winter Study of our senior year, and there was only so much to do at the College that we hadn’t done before. Breaking from our routines to sequester ourselves in the 24-hour room for 24 hours felt not only oddly exciting, but obligatory.
We knew it would not be an easy feat, and we prepared ourselves accordingly, packing our suitcases the night before. On Jan. 29, we took our last breaths of frosty air, and at 11:34 a.m., we moved into our new home, coffees in hand.
Our schemes for the 24 hours were quite ambitious: Sasha would write a chunk of her thesis, Isaac would write this Record article, and we would both manage to walk a mile in laps around the room. None of this, of course, came to pass. How we ended up spending our time so unproductively may remain a mystery — one which will haunt the 24-hour room for years to come. Isaac pretended he was in Tunnel City for the first few hours, followed by a midday nap and later an afternoon of doom scrolling. Sasha stared blankly at a Word document for many hours, as the blood drained from her head. To revive her spirits, she journeyed, barefoot, to the mid-room window to gaze longingly at the outside world (the Zilkha Center), and eventually, resigning to her seemingly meaningless existence, passed the time by watching The Sopranos over a shockingly productive friend’s shoulder.
Our 24-hour challenge quickly became a community event. Visitors kept us company for almost all of our waking hours, with particularly devoted fans journeying to bring us food. In a show of appreciation for their support, we decided to host a banquet in our new abode. We decorated the tables with the cheapest children’s party decor Stop & Shop had to offer and made a seating chart. The anticipation of this event did much to defer our boredom.
When the time for the banquet came, after ensuring that no studious 24-hour room dwellers would be disturbed, we set the mood with ambient lighting.
The banquet was a success, but we — despite our undeniable social prowess — can’t take all the credit for the charm of the event. Our friends supplied the main joy of the experience, and the eccentricity of our challenge seemed to delight everyone who came to be involved. We watched as the chorus of “Why?” from our friends turned into “Why not?” The event turned out to be, for me and perhaps my friends too, a weirdly nostalgic one. It recalled the shenanigans-motivated lifestyle of our early years at the College, when our time here seemed endless and we had no shortage of pointless schemes — plans made merely for the love of the game. Now, with the clock ticking on our time at the College, we engage less and less in experiences that are neither explicitly productive nor baked into the rhythm of Williamstown social life. Spending 24 hours in the 24-hour room was a mini rebellion against this passively busy state — the chugging along that threatens to distract us from the fundamental idleness of our lives here and from the comic relief that can be gained by leaning into the absurd nature of our Williams world.
In a recent Record article, a number of Campus Safety Services (CSS) officers were quoted reminiscing about past parties, expressing that they “respect students who fully commit to their tomfoolery” and urging students to “bring creativity back.” We can’t help but agree with them, but from the experience of an aspiring tomfool, such a culture is not always welcomed at the College and, in our experience, certainly not by CSS officers themselves.
A mere three hours after we finally laid our heads to rest at a self-respecting 3 a.m. (when the last student left the 24-hour room), we were awoken by the cacophanous sound (perhaps truly sublime) of floor-polishing machines echoing in the foyer of our then well-worn home. Our wake-up was all the more startling because, within minutes, we were met with the arrival of a CSS officer, who warned that he suspected us of being “up to no good” and setting a “dangerous precedent.” We were charmed, but baffled, by the suggestion that our endeavor would inspire copycats to occupy the 24-hour room. In order to stay in the room to finish out the 24 hours, we promised, desperately, not to recline on the couches. Our short night’s sleep was over.
We racked our brains trying to identify what was so wrong with using a campus space as it was intended. Our only offense, it seemed, was that our behavior was off-beat and hard to explain. CSS did not seem to appreciate our creativity after all.
When we finally stumbled out of the 24-hour room at 11:34 a.m. later that morning, we were quite proud of ourselves, though we would not have said so in the moment considering the degradation of our physical states. We gained nothing at all in the 24 hours, aside from a new appreciation for the moldings on the room’s ceiling. But our lack of productivity was perhaps the point of the experience: We had embraced absurdity and completed shenanigans for shenanigans’ sake. If that’s a “dangerous precedent,” then we’re not afraid to set it.
