How To Shut Down A College Party From The Inside
By Alden Derck
You’ve finally done it, thrown the first big college party at your new house and everything is going well. There’s a gaggle of cute girls dancing to a Macklemore song in the corner, the booze is flowing, and your party has adopted a nice air of nostalgia thanks to the Breakfast Club poster you hung on the living room wall. You are the party king, the party master, the royal Duke of pa —
Wait, something’s wrong.
Who invited that guy who has to be at least 40, and why is he hogging the dance floor? Is that a stray cat licking from bottles on the booze table? Why does it look like it has ringworms? Where’d your Breakfast Club poster go? Why is it on the table? Oh God, people are doing lines of cocaine off of Molly Ringwald’s face! This party needs to end, but there’s not a campus security officer in sight. It looks like this is going to call for an inside job. You turn dramatic towards camera and say “This party needs to be shut down…from the inside”.
Step 1: Run Out of Alcohol
Nothing kills a party quicker than eliminating the possibility of your guests getting drunker. Slowly make your way over to the booze table and grab a bottle at a time, taking time to hide the bottles in places no one will look (toilet brush holders, sock drawers, and boxes that once housed the collector’s edition of The Wicker Man will work well).
Step 2: Let Your Music Do the Talking
Music is the life-blood of a good party, but suddenly shutting off the stereo will only end in a riot. The best way to get guests to leave is to subtly suggest, through your tunes, that this party sucks and they should find another one. The following playlist is sure to upset, or at least unsettle most reasonable humans.
Start off with six or seven runs of “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen. To be especially cruel, sneak one normal song in the middle to make people think the torture is over, then play another six or seven runs of the song. Songs like “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” by Poison and “I Will Always Love You” by Whitney Huston are also great buzz kills. If you’re extremely desperate try playing the 2005 smash hit album Crazy Hits by Crazy Frog or any Lana Del Rey song in reverse.
Step 3: Covertly Call Campus Security
It’s been learnt the hard way that sometimes campus security officers can be a little too nice when it comes to shutting down parties, and they’ll usually tell you they can’t shut it down unless they receive numerous noise complaints. Here’s where that community theater training comes in handy.
Call the campus security line and file a noise complaint as a series of fake people, each with a different accent. Russian accent? Your name is Boris, and the loud noises of the party are disrupting you as you attempt to self-cure meats in your attic. French accent? Your name is Sophie and you need your rest to prepare for a ballet competition in the morning. South African accent? Say literally anything you want, no security officer is going to know enough about South Africa to tell you otherwise.
Step 4: If All Else Fails, Run
If none of the above steps have gotten your party shut down, then there’s only one thing to do: run. Pack up all your belongings, spend the night in a hotel, and return to your home the next day. If you’re lucky all you’ll have to do is remove a few dead bodies from your futon and your house might have that “meth lab” smell for a few weeks. If you’re not lucky, you’ll return to a pile of ashes. Either way, you should clean up and start thinking of a theme; you’ve got another party to throw tonight.