A door that won't close -- but this one's in Canada. Photo from web.
I’ve got a question for anyone in Physical Plant: if you were unable to lock or even close the front door of your house, how quickly would you expect someone to fix it? An hour? That’s about how long most on-call locksmiths will take to arrive. That’s probably unreasonably fast, though. Maybe eight hours or so—days can be busy and obviously you can’t always send someone out immediately. How about a full twenty-four hours? Would you like having to sleep at night with your door wide open in the middle of winter? Would you feel comfortable going to work the next day knowing the doors to your home wouldn’t be closed, not knowing when someone would show up to repair them?
Apparently that last question is most relevant here on campus. Yesterday, my roommate and I discovered that the two doors in our 360 apartment leading outside would not stay shut. One of them stands between our apartment and the hallway of the building, unaffected by the wind, but susceptible to being pushed open at any time, locked or not, regardless of whether you turn the door knob. The other door (the one leading directly outside) suffers the same problem, but on a windy night like it was the night before last, this door would just open on its own, no human interaction required. Our door was opened by the wind in the middle of the night and stayed in that position until I woke up that morning to a ridiculously cold apartment and shut it. Conveniently enough, not even an hour after I shut the door, the wind opened it again.
At this point I was getting a bit frustrated, so I called Physical Plant at around 11 AM. I figured they would get around to it and fix it sooner rather than later. Something that so obviously has a negative impact on the security of a student should undoubtedly be put towards the top of the priority list. Apparently I was wrong. I went to class, I went to work and I came back around 4:15 to a door that was ajar, despite having been closed quite solidly. No one had even come to look at the door. It was unfortunate, but not a big deal. I figured that I could just call again and get this all fixed up. I was told, upon calling at 4:30, that everyone had already gone home, but the lady on the phone assured me someone would tend to it first thing in the morning.
The next day I woke up around 9:00. By the time I left for my 10:30 class, still no one had come. When I returned around noon, I called Physical Plant and spoke to someone who seemed a bit aloof, but she told me she would look into it and see if someone could come out. Fortunately, an hour later, two men (John and Timmy) arrived and fixed my doors. They were extremely polite and helpful and did a great job, fixing most of the problems within minutes. Sweet! In all seriousness, they did an awesome job.
My gripe is not with the two workers who came to fix my door, though, and it’s not with the ladies who answer the phone at Physical Plant to place work orders, either. In fact, I don’t think it is any one person’s fault. My guess is that their work force simply isn’t large enough. My issue is not a particularly uncommon one. Other students have voiced similar complaints—doors taking days to fix and washing machines that flood and seem to take just a bit longer to fix than they really should. My roommate and I had to wait an entire semester for one problem to be solved.
I don’t really know what is causing this. What I do know, though, is that what happened with my front door is a problem, plain and simple. It is a glaring security issue, and an environmental one as well. It should have been, at the very least, looked at by the end of the day. Physical Plant has a tendency to put things off or forget things. Whatever the cause, it’s not right. Maybe they need to communicate more effectively; maybe they need a larger staff. Either way, I hope that whoever takes care of issues like this will try to improve things so that students don’t have to wait around for ages for what are often simple problems to fix, especially ones that have a direct effect on students’ well-being. •
