As I made my way toward a restroom in the Business Building, I was told many times to stay away, but I reassured myself I was going.
I entered and stood in shock. The easily grossed-out germaphobe in me wanted to run away, but the hulking voice of Mr. Fix It told me to get working.
Business major Christopher Tran, who has a majority of his classes in that building, said “The restrooms are always disgusting there. Sometimes I don’t want to use it, but I don’t want to walk even further to use another restroom so I just hold it.”
I was given a few awkward stares as I took up a place in the restroom where I could conduct field notes. In five minutes I noticed students just throwing their trash anywhere. I witnessed one student throw his paper towel toward a trash pile and just watched it roll down to the floor; he didn’t bother to pick it up.
We can’t expect staff to clean up after us. Facilities and Services director Charles Meyer said the custodial services are understaffed.
“There is a staff that comes in from 2 a.m. to 8 a.m. before the majority of students come to school to do the initial clean up on campus,” Meyer said. “Then at 11 a.m. we have a staff of only about five to seven people that take care of the campus. We generally have them maintain the high traffic areas such as the student center or the library.”
This problem is not just in the Business Building.
Communications major Elaine Hernandez said restrooms in the Humanities Building are OK, but get worse throughout the day.
“By the evening the floor is all wet, there’s toilet paper everywhere and the garbage is overflowing,” Hernandez said.
The solution is simple: just clean up after ourselves. We can take a quick moment to make sure our trash actually lands in the garbage or the toilet is flushed. These are things we learned before kindergarten.
We are a campus of thousands of students, and custodial services are a team of a few dozen constantly cleaning up after us. Doing our part to keep campus maintained will help the staff out immensely.
