Living at Jewell is full of experiences, and not always a good one. We’ve all had to put in a work order at one time or another. From listening to all my friends’ stories about their various work orders, it seems that most people have had a bad experience with maintenance. I have recently experienced this myself, and here is my story.
Due to a medical accommodation, my roommate and I live in a Resident Assistant (RA) room, which has a bathroom, in Mathes Hall. One day, I walked into our bathroom and heard very light tapping noises. When I lifted my head to look for the noise, I was met with a hoard of gnats in and around the light fixture of the bathroom. The noises I had heard were from the gnats flying into the light fixture. Seeing a few gnats fly out of the bathroom and into the main room, I immediately exited the bathroom and closed the door behind me to prevent more from entering my room. The infestation must have happened in the last few hours because I had used the bathroom without a hitch earlier that day.
I frantically called my roommate to fill her in on the situation and went to find my RA. The RA and RD for Mathes both came into my room to gauge the situation and were in shock from how bad the infestation was. They explained that they would put in a work order and that maintenance should come by to take care of the situation as soon as possible. In an attempt to do damage control, they sprayed the bathroom with a disinfectant spray and opened the window. However, the gnats were still there the next morning.
Upon returning to my room later in the second day, I found that maintenance had come by while my roommate and I were away. They killed all of the gnats, but they didn’t clean them up. Our bathroom was full of dead gnats. The bugs were all over the floor and the toilet seat cover. The majority of the dead gnats were in the light fixture, so my roommate and I were hesitant to clean it up ourselves. Neither of us wanted to risk damaging anything while cleaning the bugs out of the fixture, as further damage could have resulted in possibly being fined by the school.
Our RA put in another work order for maintenance to clean up the bugs, But, three days went by without any action. After another two work orders were placed, the bugs were still there, and our RA received an email saying that maintenance had ordered fly traps for our room. The email said that Amazon had initially delivered the wrong item and that maintenance should receive fly traps in the next two days. At this point, it had already been about a week and the dead bugs were still there. Five days later, our RA got an email saying that maintenance had installed a fly trap in our room, although no one found evidence of this being true. Not that the trap would have been much help at this point anyway. Eventually, our RA came into the room to clean out the gnats in our light fixture. We cleaned up the rest ourselves. To this day, we still have not received the fly traps that had supposedly been ordered.
I understand that maintenance gets a lot of work orders from all over campus, which can pile up very easily and make it hard to keep up with the workload. Despite this, the quality at which they complete their tasks matters. Sacrificing quality of work to achieve quantity of work orders completed will lead to more work orders being put in due to the shoddy work done for the sake of completion. This is a problem I hope Jewell will be able to address moving forward for the benefit of all students, faculty and staff.