Living in the dorm room where Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook means 'random' visitors and cramped quarters
(Flickr / thierry ehrmann)
No one wants to live in Mark Zuckerberg's old dorm room.
The suite — Room H33 in Harvard University's Kirkland House, where The Facebook was born in 2004 — doesn't have a plaque on the door or commemoration of any kind. One might assume the room that spawned a $265 billion company with 1.4 billion users would have a waiting list of eager, tech-loving students, but instead many actually don't realize its significance before they move in, according to Dugan Arnett at The Boston Globe.
The room is small with thin walls, too few power outlets, and no air conditioning. The three women who live there now had no idea what spot they had ended up with until move-in day. And because they are in a "forced triple" (technically, it should hold only two), they tell Dugan they would rather ditch the dorm, despite its history.
"The history is exciting for a couple of minutes, or whenever you're talking to someone new," one of the suite's former occupants, Reid Bergsund, said. "But at the end of the day, it's just a dorm room."
Though the room may not be the hottest ticket for residence, random people do occasionally try to visit:
One night a couple years back, a group of the room's then-occupants arrived home after a night out to find a handful of strangers standing in the suite's common area. After a couple awkward minutes, the roommates gathered that their visitors — who'd brought cake and beer for the occasion — had come to celebrate Facebook's 10th anniversary in the place it all started.
Although that's the story Flesher told The Globe, that's not quite how it went down, according to Kerry Flynn, a tech reporter from IBTimes:
Flynn says that she knew one of the other occupants of Zuck's old room, Alejandro Perez, and had talked to him about doing something special on the night of the anniversary. But when the evening rolled around, Perez was out partying and wasn't answering Flynn's texts. It was getting close to midnight, so she and her roomies mosied over with a bottle of 151 and shot glasses and did shots on Zuck's old desk.