As the winter weather continues to grip everyone in Chicago by their throats, with threats of awful frostbites, hypothermia, numbness, and worse, mental struggles of having to bounce back to work mode after a month’s long vacation, Illinois Tech’s management continues to do an amazingly poor job. When I returned from Seattle on the night of January 13, all I wanted to do was take a nice warm shower and sleep as I had an early class the next day but fate had other plans. To my surprise, my roommates who stayed here on the campus throughout this winter break complained of the lack of hot water provision, clogging urinals and sinks in my apartment for god knows what reason, and even though it has been at least a week since that complaint was registered, nobody came in to check about the registered HawkWorks request.
At this point, after passing a semester at Illinois Tech I do not blame the maintenance officers but rather the managers who oversee them. After a series of HawkWorks requests and complaint emails to the Office of Residence Life (ORL), they finally decided to send in a guy who did an amazing job in all honest opinions. The dude came in and sorted off a week’s problem in an hour or two. I was starting to feel glad that everything is finally working well and I can get back to good old academics and then there was another critical temperature warning this week. I am again surprised as to how few professors expect us to be physically present in college when more than half of the city is trying to stay indoors. Though this was my opinion, I had attended all the classes because who wants to lose attendance, right? Now I have an annoying flu that I cannot get rid of. And something that has been bugging me off lately was about how the commons don’t have these carry cups anymore.
Last semester, when I ran broke to buy coffee from Starbucks or hot chocolate from 7/11, the carry cups in the commons was my best bud where I would carry a cup of coffee to last me for my day or the hot chocolate to put me to sleep in the nights. With this temperature, where a hot beverage is a necessary rather than a want the management decided to strip the cups away.
So, in conclusion, this winter is critical and Illinois Tech management should do better to provide enough warmth in and around the campus, probably have a few shuttle services for the students, maybe offer some free hot drinks, and importantly have hot supple water provisions in the washrooms. I say this with uttermost care because even this morning while I was trying to grab a few tissues from the McCormick Tribune Campus Center (MTCC) washroom next to the commons, I caught the Starbucks lady struggling to wash her hands since the water was not warm. Let us not try to push her to a scenario where she chooses not to wash her hands because of the bitter cold water.