The maintenance and facilities departments provide crucial services to the university and its residential students. Without all they do, the school wouldn’t look nearly as good. Our buildings would also suffer without the upkeep they provide, so be sure to thank them when you see them doing something that benefits the university.
Maintenance is important, but so is security. When students don’t know that a maintenance employee is coming to work on their room, they’re hesitant to let them inside.
Kathryn Sugianto, mass communications freshman, woke up to find maintenance workers in her dorm. She didn’t know they were coming, so she felt uncomfortable with the situation. When she returned from class, she found debris left on her floor, and one of her posters had been damaged.
This breaches the student-university contract of trust. Students are meant to feel comfortable in their living situations without having to worry about unannounced visits. They also shouldn’t need to worry about having to clean up after maintenance workers. Workers are supposed to leave students’ dorms just as they found them, only with the repair complete.
If there is a problem with a dorm, or if a work order has been filed for maintenance assistance, then, of course, a visit from maintenance workers is necessary. But there should be communication about when to expect their arrival.
Students should have nothing to be afraid of when it comes to actual maintenance workers. University employees are just people trying to help better students’ experience of campus. The problem is that, much of the time, students have difficulty discerning a maintenance worker from an outright stranger due to the lack of identification.
Other than a university shirt, students have little to look for so as to identify a maintenance worker, and even this could be easily falsified. If there were another form of certification, such as a university-issued card or badge, then students could invite the maintenance staff into their rooms without uncertainty, knowing they have let the right people in.
On a campus as tightly-knit as OCU, students and campus employees should be perfectly at ease with one another.
If maintenance officials communicated more with the student body, the process would be smoother, safer and more comfortable.
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