Blind dates can go awry, but a roommate mismatch can spoil a semester. Nasty habits. Bitter grudges. Epic stand-offs over square inches. Luckily, most pairings don't get that ugly, whether campuses make them randomly or by running survey responses through a computer. These days many students even control their own fates: More and more colleges let them post profiles, online-dating style, and pick one another. This article reports that a handful of institutions still insist on hand-matching freshmen, one by one. The goal is for roommates, even if they don't become best friends forever, to at least get along. Housing officers on hand-matching campuses toil for weeks, steeped in human drama: passions, pet peeves, allergies. There's no substitute, they say, for personal attention. Campus tour guides parrot that point, selling all but a satisfaction guarantee. And parents pay particular attention, lest their kid wind up with a wacko.