After coughing up my weight’s worth of mucus and being curled up at home on a couch for six days, returning back to the dorm life was something I was looking forward to. I felt the warm feeling of coming home to a loving community and a fantastic room to which I had control of the remote. I was in my dorm for about an hour, and that warm feeling became a cold bowl of yesterday’s oatmeal. My ideal dream shattered at the harsh epiphany of the little things that become truly vexing.

The first crack appeared with the noise of the floor. With my door closed, I can hear someone having a conversation the next room over. When someone flushes the toilet, turns on those unfortunate devices that are supposed to dry your hands, opens and closes their door or their keys turn to lock their door, I can hear the jingle of every jangle. It’s fine during the day, but when the night owls want to go gallivanting into the night, it’s irritating to hear their every step as they go to their destination.

As I was meandering down the hallway to fetch water for my tea, the next gripe cleaved another crack into the blissful daydream. A whiteboard was covered with a person’s entire schedule and their contact information.

If I had the gall, money and time, I would hire a tall guy to dress up like slender man and follow the owner of that whiteboard throughout their day. Schedules and personal info shouldn’t be posted for any passerby to see; when you have obnoxious friends on the floor, knowing every step a person tajes can be a huge piece in an elaborate prank.

Beyond schedules, putting up Twitter ads on a whiteboard just makes me giggle.

If I am going to follow you, whether it be through Twitter or because I’m the most recent stalker, I don’t recommend putting it up.

Though this pet peeve was small, it was the needle that popped my happy little bubble: the hand dryer.

There is a single obnoxiously loud hand dryer placed in the bathroom for all drying needs.

The hand dryers are the older models. It takes about 50 seconds to really dry off your hands well, and then the stupid thing continues going for another 30 seconds.

But no one really wants to stand there that long. It would be better to change the directions to “press button, rub hands for three seconds, give up and wipe on pants while walking away with eyes averted because you activated the noisemaker of the floor.”

I gave a sympathetic glare to the fool who turned on the whirrrrrring device.

While cleaning up the shards of my fragmented daydream, the remaining cough and the lack of Internet seemed to just whisper, “There’s no place like home.”

But the phrase is swatted away as I sink into the enticing depths of the cute- and meme-filled world dubbed the Internet.