General Facilities Request
by Naomi Angel Farkas
NORMAL BUSINESS HOURS ARE MONDAY - FRIDAY FROM 8AM - 4:30PM
IF YOU ARE SUBMITTING AN EMERGENCY** REQUEST AFTER HOURS OR ON THE WEEKEND, PLEASE CONTACT CAMPUS SAFETY FOR TRADES OR CUSTODIAL ASSISTANCE. ALL OTHER REQUESTS WILL BE PROCESSED THE NEXT BUSINESS DAY.
September 29, 2025
Hi, there’s been a power outage in Burton Hall. The lights aren’t working when I try to turn them on, and they keep flickering at 3 in the morning. Thanks.
October 1, 2025
Thanks for fixing the lights. Another issue – my door keeps moving. It isn’t in the same place I left it. It keeps switching walls. Some days it opens from the inside out, other days it opens from the outside in. I tried asking my roommate, but she has been MIA for the last few days. Can you fix this? No worries if not, haha.
October 3, 2025
At night, the walls pulse like the inside of a heart’s ventricle chamber. When I put my hand up to the sandstone, the wall has the soft give of flesh. My fingers come away wet.
In the morning, all is normal. The walls are an unobtrusive beige. Flat, not quite smooth but not quite rough. My hand is clean and dry.
Please fix this! (The walls, not my hand. Obviously.) The door handle keeps moving out of my grasp every time I try to do laundry, and it’s really frustrating. I’m wearing an old theater camp t-shirt right now, and it’s starting to smell. So.
October 6, 2025
The door is gone. I’m not sure when this happened or why. Where once there was a rectangle of wood connecting me to the outside world, now there is nothing but blank wall.
I’ve been subsisting on chips and sips of bottled milk tea from DeCafé I’d been storing in my roommate's minifridge. She hasn’t been back to reclaim it. I can’t imagine how she’d get here with no door.
Sometimes I wonder if she ever existed at all. My grip on reality is increasingly tenuous. Maybe these four plain walls, this monument to collegiate rot, this body built of rolling chairs and string lights, is all that has existed and all that will ever exist.
I’ve already missed two classes. Please fix this soon.
October 0, 0000
I’m not sure if anyone is reading this, or if these work orders are disappearing into the dark and yawning oblivion. I’m not sure if I care anymore.
I awoke to find the walls had disappeared. Instead of a small and uncomfortably cramped dorm room, my creaky bed and cluttered desk are now surrounded by a deep and endless expanse of darkness. The ceiling is the same, the furniture the same. Under my feet, the same slightly sticky concrete floor, now extending eternally.
Finding nothing else to do, I began to walk, no destination in sight but the rabid animal instinct to escape. I walked until my legs gave out beneath me, and then I crawled. The air was neither hot nor cold but perfectly still, bereft of wind or life or sound. The stillness seeped into my bones, into my mind.
And in that stillness, I began to feel aware of a faint vibrating in the floor beneath my trembling hands and knees. A faint noise, like the inhaling and exhaling of breath, and a vibration that seemed to rock me forward, then back, then forward again.
Just when I had nearly abandoned all hope beneath the crushing enormity of whatever I was trapped inside, I spotted a distant light. I crawled as fast as I could.
But by the time I reached the light, I saw that it was emanating from two horribly familiar fluorescent bulbs.
I was back in what remained of my dorm room. And on my bed, right where I hadn’t left it, my laptop. It was turned on, faintly illuminating my rumpled sheets. And on the screen… this very Work Order request form.
Hello, can anyone hear me?
The Room is all there ever has been, all there ever will be. The Room loves me. It wants to hold me in its drywall arms.
I was a fool to spurn it, to believe it could be fixed. To Order Work, like I knew it better than it knows itself. It is perfect.
At night, I lie on its beating, pulsing, creaky heart. And It loves me.
It loves me.
