Emily Balan/Assistant News Editor
Some laundry services and vending machines on campus were out of service this weekend and early this week.
Gabby Turck, a sophomore Serra Hall resident, said she had trouble doing her laundry.
“I live in Serra and I didn’t even know the laundry room was broken until I was about to do it,” she said. “It was really frustrating because my laundry was overflowing so I had to take it to my friend’s house.”
She said she did not notify anyone on duty but said her friend had explained she received an email about it earlier in the day.
“I know a lot of people thought it was a housing issue,” said Mark Fabbi, director of Cabrini, Neumann and Serra Halls. “All I know is, Coinmach is the company that services our washers and dryers and it wasn’t a Coinmach issue. It was either card services or Blackboard issue with IT and I knew that it was down on Sunday.”
Tara Hart, director of Housing and Residence Life, said the outage began just after midnight on Sunday, Feb. 22.
Resident assistants received complaints from students late on Saturday evening.
Matt Ullrich, a senior RA in Boland Hall, said there were several students ready to do their laundry on Saturday around midnight, but none of the machines were working. In the morning, Doug Stringham, a junior RA in Boland Hall, called Public Safety to report the incident. He was told it was a Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center problem, meaning the specific machines were not broken, but the network that enabled swiping for laundry service was not working.
HRL became aware that the outage was affecting most of the residence halls and began working with Card Access to assess the situation, according to Hart. Card Access worked within the IT system from around 4:30 p.m. and had the systems fully operational by 9:50 p.m. on Sunday evening.
“Through collaboration with a variety of offices we were able to determine that a technology hiccup prompted the outage,” Hart said. “Once the nature and scope of the issue was isolated, our University IT systems team was able to resolve it.”
In Hart’s experience, incidents like these do not happen often. It is not known if the same ‘hiccup’ that happened this week happens often, but RAs in almost all of the residence halls have noticed that laundry services and vending machines have gone out of service on more than one occasion.
“I notice it more with laundry than with the vending machines because it gets kind of hectic, everybody comes down here asking me ‘oh why isn’t laundry working,’ but I don’t know,” said Shenaelia Gayle, a junior DA in Serra Hall.
In Aquinas Hall, Anthony Pecetto, a junior RA, said he noticed the vending machines are out of service more frequently than laundry machines. Boland Hall RAs Ullrich and Stringham notice that sometimes singular laundry machines stop working and get fixed right away, but do not notice an issue with vending machines.
RAs in Xavier Hall and Serra Hall have noticed laundry services are unavailable frequently. When asked if she noticed these services go down often, Xavier Hall RA Karly Trovarelli, a senior, said since the new washer and dryer has been in Xavier, she has noticed it happening a lot.
For future instances like this, Hart said, “For after business hours situations in the residence halls related to laundry or vending, we encourage (students) to notify our HRL staff on duty. For non-residence hall vending issues, students are encouraged to contact Public Safety and Security.”
