The Super-Secret Insider's Guide to Clock Tower Sneaking

OK. Friday's lunchroom conversation focused heavily on one of the Great Hillsdalian Dilemmas: How to Sneak into the Clock Tower.

It's there. It's cool. It's extraordinarily tempting. And people apparently go to quite drastic measures to get in. I mean...who wouldn't want to get in there and record their name with the great Clock-Tower-Sneakers of the past?

As I have a job up in financial aid, and as the lunchroom conversation got me curious, I arrived early for work and spent 5 minutes doing some in-depth investigation of the matter.

So! Before you go on one of those 1:00 AM expeditions, involving (apparently) something about a sewer-tunnel and the registrars office, you might want to read this first.

THE SUPER-SECRET INSIDER'S GUIDE TO CLOCK TOWER SNEAKING. WITH PICTURES!!!

1) You need the key.

It's not enough just to get in the building! Apparently, after having too many students sneak in, they locked the place up pretty tight. There's a padlock on the trap door. An "NQ3 MasterLock," to be precise. Which looks pretty much like this.



(I'm not sure what the keys look like, though, having never seen them).

So unless you miraculously find a way to get the key, or can miraculously pick an NQ3 Master-brand padlock, or have the inclination to smash the lock to pieces (doing actual PROPERTY DAMAGE), it's not worth your time to sneak into Central Hall. No key, no clock tower, end of story.

2) You need the key.

3) YOU NEED THE KEY!!!

4) All right. Assuming beyond believability that you do get this key, the rest is absurdly simple. You don't even have to resort to breaking into the building at 1:00 A.M. Just go at lunchtime, when no one (or hardly anyone) is there anyway. 12:00 to 1:00 P.M.

The trick is to get to the back stairway. This is quite easy. There's not locked door or anything. Go down to the basement level, and go through the waiting room down there, past the brown table. There's a hallway -- go into it, and take the last door on the right. You should find yourself in the back stairwell, by the shredding machine.

As shown here. (Pretty much, at least -- there's a couple more unimportant doors and such):



Don't worry about all the office doors on the hall -- they're never open. They're slightly cracked, but that's about it.

Anyhow...once you get into the stairwell, start climbing until there are no more stairs. You should arrive at a level that looks like this:



Climb the ladder, and go through the trap door.

5) Where you will need the key!

So...yeah. This is sort of my backhanded way of discouraging anyone from trying this, especially the midnight-through-the-tunnel-into-the-registrar's office plan. Because unless the keys are in there, all you'll have succeeded in doing is breaking into Central Hall. When you don't even need to break in.