Maintenance is not your mother

Andreya Matthew, Staff Writer
February 9, 2012
Filed under Opinion

Every college student has an incredibly revolting horror story or two about the lack of cleanliness in the residencies or bathrooms on their campus.

For example, last Friday, someone decided to decorate the elevator buttons in Foery Hall with their saliva. As it was the end of the school week and the maintenance staff doesn’t clean the residence halls during the weekends, the buttons stayed painted until Monday morning.

An even better example of this comes from when I roomed in St. Mary’s last year. Nearly every floor had a huge cleanliness issue with the bathrooms and the entire building had a meeting about it. The first 30 minutes of this meeting was everyone sharing horrible stories about people leaving food in the sinks, or dirty razors with hair on them or my favorite, people having “terrible aim” and completely missing the toilet, as if the toilet plays good offense or something!

The stories were nonstop and started to get even more scary. All were in the sole girls-only dorm on the campus, so I don’t even want to know how many stories the residents of co-ed dorms had to share or, even worse, Nelligan.

I understand that college can be gross sometimes, but I feel like Le Moyne students have 10 too many gross stories. Here I was thinking that dolphins were clean and considerate mammals! It’s hard enough living with the lack of cleanliness, but what I would hate even more is having to be the one to clean it.

Imagine waking up at 6 a.m. and your first task of the morning is to wipe some kid’s spit off of the buttons of an elevator or clean up old food out of a sink. Better yet, imagine your own mother or father having to do that. These are the messes that we leave for the maintenance staff — that’s someone else’s mom or dad! If you think about it, you are disrespecting someone else’s parent and, furthermore, a fellow human being. Why would you want to disrespect the people who are a vital part of the Le Moyne community?

For some reason, certain students completely ignore the fact that another human being has to clean up their disgusting mess. Although some people are used to having someone other than themselves cleaning up after their messes, that is not an excuse to make the maintenance staff’s job more arduous than it already is. We are adults who need to clean up after ourselves.

All we need to do is keep in mind that these are people who deserve respect, not blatant disregard for their dignity. So to those of you students who are guilty of these slobbish habits, please realize that you are disrespecting your fellow man as well as your own peers. It all comes down to mutual respect, common courtesy and being considerate of other people. Without the maintenance staff, Le Moyne would be incomplete. And ask yourself: would you want to clean up that campus?