me i'm a trouble-fearing and initiative-lacking singaporean so i look around to see if i can pay someone to do the cleaning and i complain like mad to you people for the rest of the year. the people who live here, however, are americans, so:
one: some enterprising students have seen this as a business opportunity and come up with a "college cleaning company". they're offering to clean our bathrooms once a week for $48/month. in our suite this works out to $8 per person per month so we're all very happy about it. the flyers went up just a day after we got our letters. and the website, though quite rudimentary, was up by yesterday, and the person in charge called me back the same day.
i'm impressed at how quick they've responded to the situation and turned "what a rotten situation we're in" to "aha, all the better for making money". isn't that the sort of entrepreneurial instincts that we are always saying we want? that's not saying that i'm entirely comfortable with this opportunism though. though this is the sort of reason the chinese invents gunpowder and the british points guns at them.
two: this other group of students has started circulating a petition. summarised, it says that first, our rent has gone up by $190 this year, but housekeeping services have been removed. second, housekeeping has always come as part of the package at gooch/dillard, and housing should either have let us know when we were applying, or else they should not remove housekeeping AFTER we'd paid our rents. conclusion: we have been shortchanged and deceived, and housing should issue refunds or reinstate housekeeping. again, that's a very american thing to do. petition and protest. singaporeans would never protest because we assume tt nothing can be changed and the authority isn't interested in what we think once they've said they'll do something and no one wants to invite trouble.
i don't know if all this about housekeeping is making us sound like a big bunch of spoilt kids who can't do the cleaning, or that we're really unreasonable. i haven't signed the petition because i just don't think we should be asking housing for refunds, and in anycase, of course they're not going to give it. but i do think it's horribly unfair because a lot of us chose gooch/dillard because of housekeeping, and now we aren't getting what we'd paid for. our rent is one of the highest amongst undergraduate housing, in fact i think it might be the second highest after faulkner, but it seems that we're the only residential area that has had housekeeping removed. hallway style dorms have common bathrooms so those have to be cleaned by housekeeping. apartments don't get housekeeping, but they never did and they knew that when they applied. they also pay a lot less than we do, and they have other perks like free cable. every suite is paying $1140 more this year than we did last year, so what's that money used for? how much can housekeeping cost anyway? we've called around and commercial cleaning services can do our bathrooms for under $25 for an hour and a half. housekeeping only spends about 30mins in each suite and there must be some special rate for doing the whole building. also maybe instead of cutting off housekeeping altogether, they could reduce the number of times we get housekeeping? i don't know.
as the housekeeping furore continues two things have happened: