Girlfriend Causes Junior Man to Ignore His Roommates and Halo Rankings

    Justin Bertram ’11 and Charles Walter ’11 made a mistake, in what some are calling “the worst braux-pas ever committed, a cruel inversion of the typical scenario where a girl gets her boyfriend a video game system for his birthday and never sees him again.” Ever since they introduced their roommate, Matthew Tuckman ’11 to his current girlfriend, Alex Larchmont ’11, he has been “ignoring the rankings” and, in general, “ignoring [them].” Tuckman did admit that he has been spending less and less time with his roommates and with their Xbox 360, but that he “feels like they’re smothering [him].”
    At the start of the term, Bertram, Walter, and Tuckman decided to pool their money and purchase an Xbox 360 and Halo 3, and to make a commitment to each other to “pwn as many n00bs as possible.” Things were going well between the three roommates. So well, in fact, that Bertram and Walter decided to give Tuckman a gift, so to speak. They introduced him to Larchmont, hoping that she would serve as a substitute for their camaraderie “only when we weren’t around,” Bertram and Walter stipulated.
    “Look, we hooked him up with a girl so that he could have some stuff to do when we weren’t spending time with each other,” Bertram said. “Under no circumstances did we set him up with that trifling [Larchmont] so he could spend time with her when we were trying to hang out. We made a commitment to each other. And now we’re all falling apart emotionally because we made the mistake of introducing them. How could we have been so stupid? We saw it happen to lots of guys, and we still did it… It just goes to show that you should never look out for somebody’s happiness. It makes them act stupidly.”
    Walter lamented the group’s Halo rankings and cohesiveness.
    “I don’t even want to say where our rankings have dropped to,” said Walter. “But it’s bad. And our skills are terrible, also. There are guys out there pwning us that we wouldn’t have even been matched with before. It’s so sad. But what I really miss is just spending time with him. Now he just goes into the back room with that time-suck [Larchmont] and we have to listen to the sounds of him having fun. And sometimes he just stares at her without even speaking. We’ll talk to him and he won’t even hear us. We brought this on ourselves.”
    Friends and classmates of Bertram and Walter report that for the past several weeks, they have appeared lonely and sometimes disheveled.
    “You could tell that this emotional connection was really all that was keeping them going,” said one floormate who wished to remain anonymous. “And what definitely pains them the most is that they are the cause of all this unhappiness.”
    Larchmont denied that she had anything to do with the rift between the roommates.
    “Look, if their relationship had been so great, then how am I able to put a wedge in it so easily?” she said. “And [Tuckman] has free will. It’s not like I’m performing some hypnosis on him or anything. If he wanted to spend time with them, he would.”
    Bertram and Walter say that they have learned their lesson.
    “It’s cats and dogs, man,” said Walter. “That is the last time I ever introduce any friend of mine to a girl besides a stripper name Cherry. Any girl that requires any time means the end of the man’s independence. I just wish that we could Indian-give the gift of introducing a guy to his girlfriend.”