This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/tifu by /u/ManifestDestinysChld on 2025-10-29 19:50:13+00:00.
Inspired by u/birdandbear’s delightful TIFU story.
Long, long ago at the turn of the 21st century, in the middle of my junior year of college, I decided I wanted to study abroad in Australia. Rather than do the smart thing that everybody else did and sign up for a package service run by a school in the US, I decided to raw-dog it and do all of the application and planning myself. The application part was fine; my school’s registrar helped me package up my transcript and send it off to the University of Sydney, and they accepted me and all was well. The planning everything else part, though…did I mention I was a junior in college? This was not my strong suit.
That’s how I ended up flying as far around the world as you can go before starting to come back again without knowing what I was going to do or even where I was going to sleep when I landed. I had read, you see, that the University of Sydney helpfully maintained and staffed a service somewhere between an information booth and a satellite office for arriving international students right there at the airport, with support for finding temporary and permanent accommodation, as well as connecting with the school’s student offices.
Maintains and staffs that service during the week, that is. I arrived on a Saturday morning. No staff.
Whoops.
Fast forward a couple of weeks. The academic semester hadn’t yet started, but I’d gotten myself squared away in a hostel for a couple of weeks, and then managed to talk my way into the one Residential College that still had bed space (Australian colleges don’t have frats or other Greek organizations; Residential Colleges more or less fill that same role there. The one I signed up at enthusiastically embraced their campus nickname, “the shitheads.” That’s a whole series of other stories.)
Anyway, I’m living with the shitheads, bumming around killing a week or two before classes start and all the other students arrive. The laundry service at the college wasn’t open, so I had to go to a local laundromat one sunny weekend afternoon. While my whites and colors were getting clean, I wandered into a library next door. It seemed like it was pretty busy, there were a lot of people up at the desk checking out books and such. I found something to read and plunked down in a chair at the end of a row of books.
A few minutes later, I realized it had gotten awfully quiet. But then again, it WAS a library, so I didn’t think much of it.
A few minutes after that all the lights went out, and it was that moment when it dawned on me that they were closing up when I came in, nobody had noticed me, and the staff had locked up and left with me still inside.
…Whoops.
Resolving to resolve the first things first, I stood up decisively to re-shelve my book.
All of a sudden a LOT of lights came on! And sirens! Shit, the place was wired with motion detectors!
I figured that if they had motion detectors they also had cameras, and that therefore they had me dead to rights, and in such situations I know that the last thing you ever want to do is make a cop run, so I decided the best way out was through. I went out through the front door (had to hit the crash bar, natch) and just sat down on the edge of the lawn to wait for the cops to show up.
And wait.
…And wait. I could see into the laundromat; my occupied but idle laundry machines were drawing some choice expressions from locals with dirty clothes. The alarm at the library was still going off…but it was a sunny, pleasant late-summer day in downtown Glebe, Sydney, New South Wales, and plenty of locals were out and about enjoying the sunshine and fresh air, walking right past the library and paying it no attention whatsoever. So I saw no reason why I couldn’t just…also do that. If the cops were really bothered about the alarm, they’d have showed up at some point within the last hour, I figured. So that’s what I did, I just got up, flipped my laundry, and hid out in the laundromat until my clothes were dry. By the time I came out to walk back to the college…the alarm was still going off.
For all I know it might be going off to this very day. If you live in Sydney and there’s a library with an alarm that’s been going off for 25 years? …My bad.
TL;DR: I was an idiotic, out-to-lunch college kid living alone for the first time on the other side of the world, ignorantly tripping motion alarms, escaping all consequences, and learning no lessons from it at all.