Since nearly the start of the school year, Elizabethtown College’s own app, the Jays’ App, has been filled with residential students’ complaints over dorm life.

Ranging from stolen shower heads and dorm numbers to numerous wasps in the residential halls, the incidents seem to be never-ending. The Office of Housing and Residence Life have sent numerous emails condemning the thieves and threatening to take financial action, but even this has not slowed down the chaos.

One building in which many of the incidents have occurred is the Schlosser Residence Hall. Schlosser is home to the Honors and Momentum Programs’ learning communities as well as an abundance of first-year students. Since move-in, reports from the Jay’s app of feces in the shower, and markers and showerheads being stolen have come in.

Behavior-wise, many students have been accounted for not wearing a mask inside the halls and for disrupting quiet hours according to a survey that Campus Life sent out.

Founders Residence Hall, home to the Stonewall, Global Trekkers, Wellness, Business Block and Partners in Engineering communities, is also having issues similar to Schlosser. The main problem is every room number sign on the third floor of the D Tower was removed.

Shortly after, an email from Residential Life was sent to all students residing in Founders stating that if the door numbers were not returned, all students of Founders would be fined for the cost of replacement door signs. The outrage over this email on the Jay’s App was enormous. Responses from students were clearly angry and many stated that they would refuse to pay any fine because of another’s theft. Luckily, the signs were returned, and the residents of Founders did not have to pay the fine.

A suspected source of the problems can be traced to a TikTok trend called “devious lick.” The term originated when on Sept. 1, a TikTok user posted a video claiming to have stolen a box of disposable masks from his high school. He captioned the video, “A month into school…absolutely devious lick.” This video got approximately 345,800 views before TikTok took it down, but it set in motion the dangerous trend.

The next video posted shared a similar caption and showed a boy with a hand sanitizer dispenser in his backpack. It managed to get over 7.2 million views before it was removed from the app.

Since then, the trend has exploded all over TikTok with thousands of similar videos being posted, and the items being stolen have escalated from disposable masks to soap dispensers to exit signs. Schools all across the country, mostly at the middle and high school level, are urging students not to participate in the trend, but it does not seem to be working. TikTok has put a ban on the audio most often used in the devious lick videos and has removed all videos with #deviouslick, #deviouslicks and #devious. However, this has not stopped the vandalism, and instead, it just inspired kids to get more creative with how they showed their vandalism.

The “devious lick” trend has shown to have disastrous consequences for those caught. At Etown, students are threatened with having to pay for the damaged property, but for a 15-year old boy in Florida who was caught vandalizing a school bathroom, his punishment was far worse than just having to pay a fine. The boy had removed two soap dispensers from the bathroom wall. One was found in a sink, and the other was missing. As a result, he was arrested for criminal mischief and theft.

One kindness has come from this trend. A prominent bathroom supplier company, Georgia-Pacific Pro, offered to replace paper towel and soap dispensers as well as toilet paper damaged as a result of the trend all throughout September.

In the Brinser Residence Hall and the Ober Residence Hall, the main issue is the pests that have decided to move into the dorm rooms. Numerous posts on the Jays’ App are about students complaining about the wasps taking residence in their rooms, and in one case, a student’s blanket. One student reported that dozens of bees were found inside one of the bathrooms, leaving them unusable. These concerns have largely been ignored.

Living on campus will never be perfect, but lately, it seems like the issues and incidents levels are rising at an alarming rate. With work orders repeatedly being ignored and Resident Assistants’ authority being ignored, students’ frustrations levels are at an all-time high. The question going through many residents’ heads is if there is a solution to fix the chaos.