2am dishes are just a passive aggressive drum solo. Your roommate got a free concert and still complained. Next time try the silent version where you just let them soak till noon.

Did the IT guy ever think about what happens when that plaster gets wet? Old buildings like that in Dayton, once moisture gets in behind the lath, you can't just dry it out, the whole wall has to come apart. Wireless in a place like that means every time someone bumps a node or the signal bounces weird off the tin ceiling, you're chasing ghosts. At least copper in conduit you can pull and replace without tearing the room apart.

Dealt with a few of these myself and honestly the battery and click wheel are the easy part. You can get a new battery for like 15 bucks on eBay and the click wheel ribbon just needs a good cleaning with isopropyl alcohol, half the time the swipes stop registering because of gunk not because it's dead. The iTunes thing on newer Macs is a lost cause though, modern macOS dropped support for these old devices so you need to use a Windows machine or an old Mac with an older OS to sync it. Rockbox failing at the bootloader usually means you didn't put it in disk mode first, hold menu and center until the screen flashes then it should mount and the install goes through. But real talk, if the drive still spins up fine you don't need to flash mod it, just fix the battery and wheel and sync from an old computer.