Mold, everyone’s worst nightmare.
Well, maybe not really.
Although for most, mold is that monster under your bed you forget about until it’s too late to do anything about it. Next thing you know, you are quarantining the house throwing all your furniture out on the lawn and praying that hopefully not every wall in the house has to be torn down to take care of the problem.
Though there is still something worse than finding mold in your home.
Finding mold in a dorm room, because if it’s in one, the odds of there being mold in all the rooms are pretty high.
This is a reality that hit multiple residence halls at Cabrini University. I live in Dixon house, one of the unfortunate residence halls to be stuck with this mold dilemma. Once mold was reported in some of the rooms Cabrini reacted quickly and had the worst rooms taken care of. Some rooms it seemed to take multiple days to fix. The worst rooms had a mixture of mold and mildew but not everyone had it bad. My own room for example had a tiny splotch of mildew on the ceiling where the cold water pipes run.
Now I would’ve had no problem with Cabrini hiring a third party to come in and clean our rooms.
If the mildew had actually been removed.
If we had more than a day’s notice
If we had received more than five boxes each for all of our stuff.
If our items were treated more carefully.
It started with a flyer posted on all of our doors that let us know what we had to do, the directions and when we would get our boxes.
Five each, that’s how many boxes we were given per person to put all of their belongings inside of. Let me tell you, this was not enough storage space to put everything I live with into, nor was it enough space for most of the people in Dixon house.
Now to talk about what was probably the most frustrating part of it all, the time frame we had to have everything done by. Everything we owned, including the bed sheets and the T.V. and in my case my desktop had to be packed onto our bed by 11 a.m the next morning. This was extremely inconvenient for me and my friends due to the fact that we had night classes and couldn’t focus on cleaning our rooms out entirely when you have a class that runs from 7:15 p.m to 9:45 p.m at night plus homework and studying to do as it is.
We weren’t allowed into our room’s again until five in the afternoon while the professional cleaning was done. This was extremely troubling for people that don’t have anywhere to go for the following six hours of the day. It’s hard to imagine you would want to just hang out in the cafeteria for six hours straight.
Finally after all the waiting, we got to see our rooms after the professional cleaning.
For starters, the only difference in the room was that the room smelled only slightly like someone had just rubbed a bunch of car fresheners all over everything.
As if to add insult to injury, the spot of mildew on the ceiling of our room was still there. Something that could’ve been taken care of as easy and quickly as just wiping it down with a Clorox wipe, which we did later. To rub it in our face how trivial the work of us putting all of our stuff into boxes was, well, as much stuff as we could, all of the boxes were moved and buried into different corners of the room, with everything misplaced. Several of my posters that I had already taken down off the walls were now completely crumpled, and I wasn’t the only one treated like this either.
As it turned out many other people had to deal with this careless professional treatment. Some of my friends even lost very personal items to them. My friend Ant for example had his super rare Eric Clapton poster that his dad got him for his 13th birthday was now completely folded up and ruined, he considered it irreplaceable to him.
