Living off campus is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is obvious: you're not living in a residence hall. Enough said. The curse comes when you have to deal with the various agencies that provide the basic services, which used to be a part of your on-campus living agreement, especially when dealing with duplexes.
For example, take the curbside recycling program. While it is extremely convenient and enables anyone paying to have their trash collected and provides the option of recycling, the whole process of having your materials actually collected is slightly ridiculous.
While waiting for a recycling bin to be delivered, I was advised to place my recycled materials by the curb in a box and to label it as recycling. Neither the trash service nor the recycling collectors picked up my recyclables that week. My cans, milk jugs, cardboard boxes and pop bottles were left stranded. Walking to campus from my house on numerous occasions, I have seen that the same thing has happened to other unsuspecting Rumpke customers. Plastic tubs filled with last night's cans are left discarded on the side of the road, simply because they were not placed in the standardized container that takes up to two weeks to be delivered.
My shiny red Rumpke bins finally arrived, and we loaded them to the brim. Seeing my two bins sitting on the curb, I felt a sense of pride. It was a beautiful sight. The next morning, I woke up to find that not only had my recycling and trash had been picked up, but one of my bins had mysteriously disappeared as well. Why would Rumpke take away my recycling bin? We'll never know … but it's time to make another phone call.
The other three-ring circus off-campus students enjoy is the close relationship developed with Time Warner Cable. With unpaid bills, unclosed accounts from prior tenants and the miscommunication between the office and technicians that show up at your door, the fun never stops. I literally watched a Time Warner Cable worker pull into my driveway, climb his ladder up to the cable box on the telephone poll and turn off my service without even talking to anyone at our house. A call to the office inquiring why our Internet and cable TV had been disconnected only gained us an appointment to have our service turned back on.
Not only are the constant phone calls to the city of Oxford and Time Warner Cable annoying, but they waste both the time of the consumer and the resources of the offices in general. Clearly, a lack of communication between the offices and the workers on the ground results in numerous misunderstandings and pointless hours spent trying to fix problems that could have easily been avoided.
My landlord has dismissed these kinds of mix-ups as a result of the "small town mentality" that is characteristic of Oxford. But in a time when businesses are conserving resources more than ever, efficiency should be something a company strives to achieve. Repeatedly bothering the secretary at the city of Oxford's Municipal Building about a missing red plastic bin accomplishes nothing productive. Oxford may be a small town, but that doesn't mean it can't run like a well-oiled machine.
Amy Biolchini biolchal@muohio.edu
