The beginning of the paint bubble
Hadley Thompson/The Bona Venture
thompshp20@bonaventure.edu
BY: HADLEY THOMPSON, NEWS EDITOR
Some students in the residence options at St. Bonaventure University have had experiences with mice, leaking toilets and Facility Service Requests.
“I am not sure what they can do in that situation, but it did not feel like they were trying really,” Faith Pingie, a junior education major, said. “We had to call and make sure that there was going to be someone coming to check it out.”
In Townhouse 22, half of the ceiling bathroom started leaking. Pingie said that the wallpaper had a big bubble in it and was dripping water all over the walls. Her roommate noticed the water-filled bubble when she went to grab toilet paper and it was wet and brown.
Allie Zhang, a junior public health and health science major, said that she woke up with a leak in her bathroom that had seemingly progressed overnight.
“The leak was mitigated by my roommate turning off the water supply to our toilet, but it continued to continuously drip throughout the day,” Zhang said. “This required us to repeatedly dump out water that had been collecting in a bowl behind the seat of our toilet and escalated to drippage from the ceiling in the apartment below us.”
Zhang and her roommates tried to get in touch with someone to help.
“Eventually, a guard was sent over, who took a picture of the leaking and reiterated to us that it was the weekend, so the problem could not be addressed until Monday,” Zhang said.
Pingie also called Safety and Security and they sent a guard over to check on the problem. The guard did not know that he was supposed to take pictures to send back to see if the water leak was bad enough to call for emergency maintenance. Pingie said her roommate reminded the guard.
“We just wanted to know if our ceiling was going to cave in from all of the water and we were going to have to move out of our townhouse,” Pingie said. “We were told that maintenance was not in on weekends and that we would have to wait until Monday.”
Pingie said that she was thankful she happened to be home when a security guard was sent over to assess the problem because guards often knock once and then walk in.
“We would not get a 15-minute warning or even a set time for them to check the problem out. They just walk in,” Pingie said.
Zhang said that maintenance completely fixed the toilet upstairs. Pingie said that the carpentry fixes are still needed downstairs.
At the beginning of the semester, Pingie said she requested help because their townhouse had an electric problem.
“Every time that we would turn on two lights at the same time, all of the lights would go out in the townhouse,” Pingie said.
She said amongst her roommates, they submitted four Facility Service Requests.
“We just had to figure out how to deal with it I guess,” Pingie said.
In Townhouse 22, some residents also had a run-in with a mouse. Pingie said that she wanted help getting rid of the mouse.
“The mouse just took the peanut butter off the trap, I watched him. So it wasn’t very well set,” Pingie said. “They supplied the trap but we had to do it on our own.”
Sophie Nix, a junior education major, also had a mouse in her dorm last year in Devereux Hall.
“There was a hole in my wall near the pipes and that’s where they were coming from,” Nix said. “They set up a mouse trap and ended up catching one.”
Nix said that they tried to fill the hole so that the mice would not get in, but they had a trap near it for the rest of the year.
Nix mentioned that her friend, who also lived in Devereux, had mice in her ceiling.
“Her room was the only one that had panel ceiling that was not cement, so you could hear them up there,” Nix said. “I know she reached out to our RA about it but there was nothing they could do.”
Overall, students have said that they understand the importance of maintenance on a college campus.
“I understand that the school tries to provide us with the best housing options and they can’t always control what happens,” Pingie said. “I just wish this time it was a little more urgent.”
The director of Facilities did not reply to requests for a comment.
thompshp20@bonaventure.edu
