Service Alert! Welcome to Carman Hall.

If you’ve waltzed into Carman any time in the past few weeks, you’ve probably noticed that the elevators are pretty fucked up. And we’re pretty tired of it. So we decided it was high time for a callout…

Over the weekend, I was sitting in my Carman suite watching Netflix and enjoying a breezy afternoon. Then I get a call from my roommate telling me that she’s downstairs in the lobby with four six-packs of [redacted] and all three elevators are broken. She needs me to come down and help her carry them up the stairs.

Are you kidding me, Carman Hall? The two lobby elevators are broken and the freight elevator isn’t running? What kind of an institution is this? Do you even realize how much tuition we’re all paying? Nevermind the crumbling ceiling tiles, cockroaches, and puke-stained carpets. All of that I can live with. But no elevators? This is taking Carman to a new extreme.

It all started with an email from Columbia Hospitality on February 8.

By February 15th? We’ll see about that…

I would like to point out that the subject line of this email said “Scheduled Outage.” So this wasn’t a surprise. The elevator had been out for days, but now it was scheduled to be out so they could work on it. Personally, I don’t care if it’s scheduled to be out or just plain out. Broken is broken.

The email said the elevator would be fixed by February 15th. Flash forward to February 16…

BOTH ELEVATORS! So much for February 15th! This officially meant that the only elevator in Carman Hall was the freight elevator, which is “in service” one third of the time. Gone are the days of sneaking into the service stairwell when the lobby is packed on a Monday afternoon. After February 16th, the service stairwell was stuffed with scowling students, huffing and puffing about the inconvenience.

BOTH! Both elevators!

As of today (February 20th), only one of the lobby elevators is out. This is at least a bit of an improvement, right? As long as no one gets stuck between floors like last time…

Oh, and one closing note. If you get on the packed service elevator in your Columbia football/basketball/wrestling sweatshirt and press the button for the third floor, we WILL all hate you. Have some decency in these trying times.