Dear Editor, Here at ETSU we have a lot of things we are proud of.

Among them are numerous sports teams, academic excellence, and the overall air of acceptance and compassion on the campus.

For a school with more than 15,000 students we as a body of learners are a very approachable bunch.

Having said that, it comes as a surprise to me that the housing department has treated us students no better than the door mats in front of our places of residence.

I will preface this letter by saying, by and large, the person-to-person interactions within this department have been fantastic.

I have seen every day since my admission to this institution the daily efforts of many good men and women working very hard to do their jobs well.

That is what makes it so hard to tell the other side of that story.

The people work. The systems, rituals, charades and environments do not.

In the last three months housing has lost no less than five, yes five, copies of signed documents.

Forms which had my personal data on them, gone.

Forms where I explicitly gave my contact information were seemingly tossed to the void when it came time to give me a phone call.

The fax machine in that office must be sitting on top the paper shredder for the number of attempts that is required for just a simple piece of paper to find its way home to a file.

It took four trips back and forth from my hometown, more than three hours away, to correct what amounted to a check in a box.

As one case is not indicative of the whole, I asked around to see if somehow I was the victim of bad luck.

Unfortunately, there are even worse cases where students are still without a place to live into the first week of class because of lost paperwork.

In August when I moved in to the new apartments built on campus, I assumed the worst was over and I could finally spend more time studying than I did on the phone with housing.

It has taken only a week for that to be proven a false hope.

When I moved in, the air conditioning units in the brand new building did not work for the whole first floor of residents.

Earlier this week, the fire alarm was set off by maintenance early in the morning and today I came home to the sound of drip . drip . drip.

The air-conditioning unit in my room that was supposedly fixed was not installed correctly.

My printer paid the ultimate sacrifice as the leak had soaked it next to my desk.

It sat idle . with a little light blinking erratically then finally went dead; taking with it to the great beyond my patience.

I was not alone, as one girl upstairs told me the ceiling had sprung a leak from the shower above her.

Another gentleman was studying outside today on a pile of dirt near the ongoing construction across the street.

I asked him why he had picked such a place and his only curt reply was that it was better in a ditch than in his room.

The last straw occurred as I was attempting to finish some homework whilst sitting atop soaking towels in my desk chair, with water droplets hitting my head from the still leaking A/C.

Someone had decided to test if the backup generator would kick on in the case of a power failure, and to do so had cut the power to the whole building without telling anyone.

I was in the process of saving work to a flash drive, and the file was rather large.

The power interruption destroyed the file structure on the drive, and with it my last resolve to hunker down and suck it up.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Department of Housing at ETSU, I implore you, fix how you do business.

Working harder to force a round peg into a square hole will not yield any different result, regardless of how hard you try.

I see many of you attempting to make the structures work, but it is not enough if the system is inherently broken.

I am not sure where the solution lies, but I am sure that it is not in treating the students like door mats.

-Peter McCann

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