Saturday Night at Dick's House

I'm sure you've all been on your fair share of college tours over the past year (I wonder if the Elias Sports Bureau keeps records of most colleges visited by a perspective student), so you've all most definitely had an encounter with "that parent." I'm talking about the mom or dad who talks more than the tour guide. I'm talking about the parent who makes statements instead of asking questions. And yes, I'm talking about that special adult who in front of the entire tour, talks up their son or daughter and then asks what their chance for admission is.

(Cue the theme to the "Real Men of Genius" commercials)

Here's to you, Mr. Way Too Many Questions Asker. We salute you.

Anyway... my mom was never "that parent," but she did without fail always ask about the health services at each college we visited. She was quite happy with Dartmouth's facilities and after coming down with mono last term, I'd have to agree with her. But no matter how great Dick's House is (I'm not sure who Dick is, but that's the name for Dartmouth's on-campus health center), it's still by no means a place everyone rushes over to hang out at.

But besides being sick, there is one other way to get a trip to Dick's House. If you are picked up by Safety and Security, the campus security force, for having a few too many drinks, you get the privilege of a mandatory trip to stay with the lovely Dick's House nurses until you sober up.

I am over mono now, but I went to Dick's House on Saturday night - to hang out.

And here's what I brought with me: a flask of whiskey, a bottle of Listerine, and a homemade breathalyzer (A machine that measures the amount of alcohol contained in a person's blood, known as their BAC, or blood alcohol content).

Why, you ask?

You see, we had spent the past week making this breathalyzer for an Electrical Engineering class project. We had also spent that entire past week making jokes about how to test it. (Other projects for the class included a phone tap and a heart rate monitor constructed by a brave group that was willing to run current from their experimental circuit through their bodies.) To calibrate our breathalyzer we figured there would be no better way than to compare it with one of Dick's House's very own state-of-the-art ones and maybe, just maybe, Safety and Security would even deliver us some test subjects.

Upon walking in, we were immediately identified as the "Breathalyzer Boys," and for the next two hours we tinkered with our own breathalyzer and even found some time to see how high we could get the real breathalyzer to read.

(For the record, putting an open container of whiskey right next to a breathalyzer corresponds to a reading of about 1.43, or more than 17 times the legal limit, or wow, thank goodness that's not my blood!)

Although we ended up being the only students present on Saturday, the nurses were extremely helpful and we managed to tinker with the resistances in our circuit (I realize this is probably setting off the "technical mumbo-jumbo" alarm for some of you) so that a blood alcohol content of 0.08 corresponded to five of our ten lights being lit up. We walked out an hour or so later with a working breathalyzer and an abundance of knowledge about how the real ones work.