Over the past year, it seems like things have changed at Guilford. Most tediously, the walk past Milner. Whereas before one might have enjoyed a slightly faster walk with a view of that prison courtyard, we have been corralled into a single sidewalk down a street with chain-link fences. It’s a fairly minimal complaint really, but it brings to mind the entire dormitory that used to exist there. Many of us spent our first year at Guilford in Milner collected under the banner of “MilNasty.” Now there’s a whole year of students deprived of those homey insane-asylum hallways and flickering lights. It makes one wonder if the Milner experience will survive its renovation.

The Milner experience was always characterized by an unpleasantly odd sense of spontaneity. One would wake up in their cell and see their roommate rolled up in a cocoon of blankets, stalling their day. They would flick on that rectangle on the ceiling to a lovely bleaching light and make their way to the “MilNasty” bathroom. The showers were always beholden to a very particular atmosphere. Depending on who made it to the shower first, the music could be anything from Country to Latin, and if you were lucky, even both at the same time. I myself can distinctly remember getting caught in the midst of an absolute speaker-war. After a shower maybe you’d head to the sinks and find that some real considerate dude left you some ramen for breakfast. Always a nice surprise. Or perhaps you did not appreciate the ramen and chose to bring a trashcan into the center of the bathroom. Effective message, my friend. Still, the best stories from Milner’s bathroom are too graphic to actually enjoy talking about. Of course many tales from the hallway could also be considered bathroom stories.

Nights in Milner were a whole different sort of lore. Unlike the fairly mundane annoyances in the morning, these surprises often spanned from the only minorly-anxiety-producing to the absolutely horrific

While scurrying your way back through the hallways to your room, those insane asylum halls could be decorated with just about anything. One night, a single chair sitting in the middle of the floor. Was someone sitting there, did someone steal a chair, what’s wrong with the chair? You don’t know, you want to go to bed. Another night, a puddle of vomit in the exact place the chair was set. Coincidence probably, but still kind of weird, right? A single banana taped to a door. An entire bowl of cereal, right in front of the stairs. A Ziploc bag, full of urine, right next to the cereal.

None of these things were all that surprising when you walked Milner’s halls, and it surely marked Milner as being worthy of the “MilNasty” title. But we can always remember the good times, can’t we? Those hallways carried any noise from one end of the building to the other, connecting every resident. Like that guy who always whistles when he walks the halls, that guy who won the speaker war, or that couple that had super loud sex all the time.

The Milner experience is quite something, but I don’t think any of us would claim to have relished the Milner experience. There wasn’t any sort of disheveled pride earned in living through “MilNasty.” That being said, I think the Milner experience will surely outlast the renovation. After all, Binford was renovated and it still has those weird showers, right? More generations should have the Milner experience, if not so we can laugh at them, then at least so we can commiserate over the filthy bastards we once were.