By
Nobody
Residence Life has history of problems
To the editor,
Talk about putting the horse before the cart: Residence Life has done it again! Hats off to Jim Van Arsdel and his planning team for exhibiting top-notch project management skills in displacing 80 students to a local hotel. What really surprises me is that this kind of mismanagement happens again and again, year after year, and the students suffer. How about the year that students lived on a construction site (La Paz) for 2 months? Or the time cable television was installed, and it took 2 years to actually get service running to it? Or maybe the time Christopher City, the graduate housing projects (and I do mean 'projects' !) got so bad it was practically falling in on itself? Or how about the time that Jim thought it would be a good idea to make dorms only for freshman without ever assessing how the returning students felt? It's a good thing that Jim and his logistics crew found a place to work on a college campus and not in the real world. To make a comparison, students are the customers. If this organization were a legitimate business, this type of repeated disservice would cause their current and potential 'customers' to avoid Residence Life like the plague (no offense to the 'Viral-ly challenged). Usually customers are refunded a partial or full amount of their fee for the inconvenience they have experienced instead of getting lip-service in the form of statements like 'Students are taking the news very well,' or '..in a perfect world we would have been completed by now'. In a perfect world these jokers (no offense to the 'jovially-enhanced') would be out of a job, plain and simple. Unlike the 'real world' these students don't have a competitor to turn to and are forced to settle for less and live like refugees (no offense to the 'nomadically-enabled') until their real home is finished. Forget the ice cream: those 1500 dollar per day 'fines' that the contractor is paying out for being 'late' should be re-distributed back to the hands of the students who have to put up with this mess and live in a hotel, and a little kick-back to myself for taking 10 minutes to write this letter pointing out the obvious.
Bear Down!
Kirk Sibley
Intel Corporation
Class of '99
Foodservices underrated
To the editor,
I am writing to express support for the food service program at this university. I am saddened to see the continuation of this paper's tradition of showing blatant disrespect to everyone who is employed by the university. The dining services program on this campus has a proud tradition of providing high quality food at a reasonable price. Aside from this, they also offer locations that are convenient to students. All of this criticism is unfair and undeserved. In response to comments by previous writers, employees of dining services are not uncaring, stone-faced automatons. Anyone who thinks that union employees are somehow, mindless drones should visit a very kind and outgoing woman named Betty who works faithfully in the Fiddlee Fig. Betty is a thousand times more friendly than anyone you would have found at the hot dog carts. Unlike Dawg Daze employees, her compassion is genuine, and not contrived to win customers. Employees of the University work hard every day to serve the needs of the campus community. I think that their commitment to serving you deserves more respect and honor from everyone on this campus. Student employees of the union must struggle to balance work and school in such a way that their grades are not compromised. Instead of criticizing each other, let's try to get along and recognize that we are all on the same team. This is a time of change for our campus. This change is not always comfortable, but we must realize that when it is finished everyone will benefit from it.
Jason Patrick
Creative writing sophomore
