CU employees are doing more than their fair share
It’s a phenomenon that many college students who have lived in the dorms have experienced. It’s Sunday night, and the bathrooms are absolutely trashed: toilet paper all over the floor, vomit clogging one of the toilets, old pizza boxes piled into the trash can and sinks smeared with toothpaste and hair.
Whew, thank goodness someone’s going to clean them tomorrow.
The next question, however, is who is going to have to scrub those floors, sinks and toilets?
What most people either don’t allow themselves to think about is how terrible it is for housekeeping staff to come in every morning to a horrendously gross bathroom with an obscene level of mess that they have absolutely no control over.
The problem extends campus-wide. All over, cleaning and housekeeping employees have to clean up unnecessary amounts of mess that students leave in their wake.
“The workers are treated horribly,” said Andrew Riccio, a senior international affairs major and volunteer with a program that provides English tutoring to CU employees. “I hear stories all the time about how students treat workers with absolutely no respect and what students do to make it more difficult for workers to do their jobs.”
The fact that students could act with so much blatant inconsideration is sickening.
I’m sure that most students don’t go out of their way to make messes, but that doesn’t excuse them from cleaning up after themselves.
One of the managers of housekeeping, Alex Acosta, had a similar opinion. He said he doesn’t take the messes personally, but just wonders why students don’t flush the toilet or put their trash in the wastebasket.
“It’s something that’s really easy to do,” Acosta said.
His question is something that all students should ask themselves and their peers. Really, how hard is it to clean up after yourself? In the bathroom, the hallway or the dining hall, it seems pretty simple. You make the mess; you clean it up.
It is also a matter of respect for others in the dorms and members of the housekeeping staff that so diligently make everything sparkle day after day. Perhaps stuffing a gross pizza box in the trash can and then emptying Ramen leftovers into the sink is the easiest way to clean your room, but think about everyone else who has to look at that gross food every time they go to the bathroom.
If students had to clean the bathrooms themselves, I’m pretty sure that there would be a magical shift in their cleanliness.
The housekeeping staff is an amazingly intelligent, caring group of people, which is a fact that students should remember. Taking time to treat these people as peers instead of maids would benefit our whole university community.
Contact Campus Press staff writer Emery Cowan at emerycowan@thecampuspress.com
