As if getting out of bed and making it to class every morning isn’t difficult enough, some Binghamton University students have to suffer through their daily showers as well. Residents of some wings of College-in-the-Woods’ Oneida Hall have complained that they lack water — no, not hot water, but cold. They have for almost a year now, they say, and nobody has done anything about it.
Andrea Jung, a resident of the A-L section of Oneida’s second floor, told a Pipe Dream reporter that only one of the two showers in her wing’s bathroom has cold water. As for the other shower, Jung, of 2L, said, “Whenever someone flushes while someone else is showering, the water gets extremely hot and the person using the toilet has to yell ‘Flush!’ so the person in the shower can get out.”
Giovanni Torres, a sophomore who has spent three semesters in Oneida’s 3A-L section, also complained of water issues. Torres and his roommate in 3L, sophomore Brian Derry, both said that having only burning-hot water in their hall lounge’s kitchen also becomes a problem when it comes time to cook or do dishes.
THE RESPONSE
“There are problems throughout the building,” Torres said. “Plumbing is a major issue in Oneida.” But Torres said that he received numerous complaints from residents about the problem when he ran for Oneida Hall president last year, but every time he spoke to resident assistants or the area’s resident director he was told that they were “working on it.”
To Derry and Torres, the situation is especially frustrating because issues that are in their view less important are given priority. “They can get the bench outside [of Oneida] painted in a week, but of course they can’t get the plumbing done,” Torres said. And Derry said that he and Torres were billed almost $200 for a broken screen in their dorm room last year, “but still have to do the dishes with scalding water.”
“I brought this up at floor meetings more than once last year,” Derry said, “because I think this is a problem that should be addressed.”
The building has had its share of maintenance issues. According to its spokeswoman, BU’s Physical Facilities has received 79 service requests from Oneida since the beginning of August. These include complaints about jammed drawers, leaky faucets, missing recycling bins and lack of hot water — but none about a lack of cold water. Karen Fennie, the spokeswoman, said that about 75 percent of these complaints have since been addressed.
And depending upon the priority of the problems, Fennie said, they tend to be taken care of within three to 14 days of being received. Requests put in by the office of Residential Life are responded to first. “We try to get to that within three days,” she said. Complaints submitted on paper or online, meanwhile, are addressed “afterward.”
But Fennie said that, as of printing, no work had been done on any of Oneida’s cold-water problems — because Facilities hadn’t received a work order from anyone. Without one, she said, there’s no way for Physical Facilities to know anything is wrong. “We need a service request to take action,” she said.
FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE
Rene Coderre, Residential Life’s assistant director for Facilities, acknowledged that there have been problems in relaying residents’ complaints to Physical Facilities in an efficient manner. An article in the Sept. 19 issue of Pipe Dream detailed how miscommunications between the two departments temporarily left a number of students in Mohawk and Oneida Halls without much of the furniture they expected.
To help avoid more of these kinds of situations, Coderre said, Res Life is developing a system through which students will be able to electronically submit their complaints to the department. The program, Coderre explained, will allow residents to fill out work order forms online which will be immediately forwarded to the RDs of their buildings, and then to the appropriate people in Facilities. He hopes the new system will “speed up the process” — but he couldn’t say with any certainty when it would be ready.