"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - unam.

theoretical physicists had to stay up there anyway. The first place they put us was in an
old school building ­­ a boys' school that had been there previously. I lived in a thing
called the Mechanics' Lodge. We were all jammed in there in bunk beds, and it wasn't
organized very well because Bob Christy and his wife had to go to the bathroom through
our bedroom. So that was very uncomfortable.
At last the dormitory was built. I went down to the place where rooms were
assigned, and they said, you can pick your room now. You know what I did? I looked to
see where the girls' dormitory was, and then I picked a room that looked right across ­­
though later I discovered a big tree was growing right in front of the window of that
room.
They told me there would be two people in a room, but that would only be
temporary. Every two rooms would share a bathroom, and there would be double­decker
bunks in each room. But I didn't want two people in the room.
The night I got there, nobody else was there, and I decided to try to keep my room
to myself. My wife was sick with TB in Albuquerque, but I had some boxes of stuff of
hers. So I took out a little nightgown, opened the top bed, and threw the nightgown
carelessly on it. I took out some slippers, and I threw some powder on the floor in the
bathroom. I just made it look like somebody else was there. So, what happened? Well, it's
supposed to be a men's dormitory, see? So I came home that night, and my pajamas are
folded nicely, and put under the pillow at the bottom, and my slippers put nicely at the
bottom of the bed. The lady's nightgown is nicely folded under the pillow, the bed is all
fixed up and made, and the slippers are put down nicely. The powder is cleaned from the
bathroom and nobody is sleeping in the upper bed.
Next night, the same thing. When I wake up, I rumple up the top bed, I throw the
nightgown on it sloppily and scatter the powder in the bathroom and so on. I went on like
this for four nights until everybody was settled and there was no more danger that they
would put a second person in the room. Each night, everything was set out very neatly,
even though it was a men's dormitory.
I didn't know it then, but this little ruse got me involved in politics. There were all
kinds of factions there, of course ­­ the housewives' faction, the mechanics' faction, the
technical peoples' faction, and so on. Well, the bachelors and bachelor girls who lived in
the dormitory felt they had to have a faction too, because a new rule had been
promulgated: No Women in the Men's Dorm. Well, this is absolutely ridiculous! After
all, we are grown people! What kind of nonsense is this? We had to have political action.
So we debated this stuff, and I was elected to represent the dormitory people in the town
council.
After I'd been in it for about a year and a half, I was talking to Hans Bethe about
something. He was on the big governing council all this time, and I told him about this
trick with my wife's nightgown and bedroom slippers. He started to laugh. "So that's how
you got on the town council," he said.
It turned out that what happened was this. The woman who cleans the rooms in
the dormitory opens this door, and all of a sudden there is trouble: somebody is sleeping
with one of the guys! She reports to the chief charwoman, the chief charwoman reports to
the lieutenant, the lieutenant reports to the major. It goes all the way up through the
generals to the governing board.
What are they going to do? They're going to think about it, that's what! But, in the