For the last four months, a certain Cheese Grater journalist's room in John Dodgson House has been assaulted from all sides by plagues the likes of which have been unseen since biblical Egypt.
While this is a catastrophic exaggeration, it’s certainly the case that I live in a poorly managed, crumbling building that is worth considerably less than I fork out every couple of months.
People often discuss the drawbacks of UCL Accommodation. Hell, I discuss it with the suicide restrictors on my window almost daily now. However, I don’t think non-residents fully appreciate the utter absurdity of my living situation.
I mean, just on the day of writing, JDH installed a TV in the lobby to play adverts 24/7. It’s honestly a gift being able to walk through the front doors and be forced to admire Sainsburys’ new ‘healthy range’, while knowing I pay for the experience.
If I think about how there are now unskippable ads every time I come home I’m going to pop a blood vessel, so let’s move onto the more tangible issues.
First, I’ve had no heating in my room since I moved in. In fact, there’s no evidence to suggest that [redacted room number] has ever had a working radiator. JDH is unusually warm (probably because it’s built over a portal to Hades), but I still found myself shivering in bed during the bleak midwinter.
I told reception about the problem. They sighed, handed me a clipboard and told me to write it down. The list of complaints I was adding to was already several pages thick, and dated from the start of that term. We were two weeks in.
The benefit was that they gave me a portable radiator. This radiator looked like it was older than my father (a real achievement for those that know him), and had a rather considerable dent on top. I can only assume this is because a former resident finally snapped and used it as a weapon in some kind of potentially lethal bludgeoning. At least they were able to clean off the blood before it fell into my possession like some cursed heirloom.
Armed with heat and feeling akin to a caveman discovering fire for the first time, I plugged in the radiator and went to sleep.
I awoke to a flooded windowsill.
Turns out the radiator was too small to heat the entire room, so it had created some kind of convection current that steamed up my window to the point that everything below was now drenched in water.
The only solution to this is to keep the window open while the radiator runs. This makes the room cold again.
No-one has come to fix the original radiator, which only seems capable of emitting an ominous red light when all the lights are turned off.
Heating’s not the only problem, though. A few weeks after I moved in I received an email telling me that the common room had been closed due to “a roof leak in front of the toilet, which is causing the electricity to trip”. They advised us not to use the common room as it posed “major health and safety risks’.
After a month, the room was reopened. The roof was still leaking. It appeared that JDH’s ‘fix’ for the issue was to assemble a legion of assorted buckets underneath the dripping roof, which made the room sound like a troll’s dungeon.
At the time of writing, the leak is still there, and the roof has started to sag a bit.
The rooms in JDH are equipped with en-suites. This is not a benefit. In an effort to, presumably, save as much money as physically possible, the showers in most rooms have shower curtains that are far too big for the opening. This means that every time I take a shower, I have to stand legs-akimbo over the drain with one foot planting the curtain firmly on the floor.
If I don’t — and I learned this the hard way — the curtain covers the drain and the entire bathroom almost instantly floods with water. It seems the trade-off for pretty decent water pressure is the diabolical game of Twister I have to play with this bastard curtain. Oh, and if I slip, I’ll probably break my neck.
Turns out this is a shared problem among residents. I received an email from JDH stating “we are aware there has been some flooding [...] the flooding is caused by the shower curtains covering the shower drain”. Thank fuck! They’re actually planning to do something, I thought.
They followed this up by saying “from investigating this issue, we have found that the only preventable solution is to be mindful when showering”. Praise be to their Sherlock-esque levels of deduction! Thank the heavens for their nuanced and enlightened solution!
Now is the time to mention that only a few floors are affected by this. Floors 0 & 1 have been equipped with doors in their showers. Floors 5 & 6 are brand new and are designed with actual comfort in mind, so their showers are large enough to avoid the problem.
Floors 2, 3 & 4 (the Western Front) are left to the hands of fate, apparently.
The shower curtain situation also means that the bottom crumples up when you’re done with your wash, trapping water in the folds and creating a festering layer of mould.
Mould seems to be one of the only dependable resources in JDH. It’s on the windows, in the bathrooms, baked into the carpet — the spores hopefully choking us to death before we can come to terms about the money we’re spending on living here.
We get all the colours of the mouldy rainbow, too. I’ve got some greens and whites in the corners of my window, and certain parts of my shower have turned a lovely shade of cancerous pink. If you ever visit, I encourage you to play mould bingo (maybe a couple games as they’ll be over fairly quickly).
There is literally no way to stop this. I’ve tried. JDH’s official advice is to “maintain a consistent temperature”. I’m tempted to put a new dent in the tiny radiator they gifted me.
Let’s talk about water. How’s yours? Ours is milky.
The hot water in JDH is scalding to the point that the tap can only be used for a few seconds before it becomes physically impossible to hold your hands under what feels like the river Styx.
It’s also a disgusting, cloudy colour. I don’t think this needs to be said, but ideally you should be able to see through a glass of water that we’re told is completely safe and drinkable.
Although I’ll take what I can get, considering the hot water almost constantly just… turns off.
It must be some kind of plumbing miracle that they can keep fixing it, and it just keeps breaking, like a malignant tumor that just won’t go away. In one case, we received an email informing us that the hot water was broken — then one the next day telling us it was fixed — then another the day after letting us know it was broken again.
Given that this sort of treatment is handed out to inmates in Guantanamo Bay for free, you should be shocked to find out that I’m paying £340 a week for this.
With the building packed full of residents, you have to ask - where does all the money go? I can only assume they’re using it to build us a new JDH made entirely of fivers, stacked on top of each other, because they’re certainly not doing anything to fix the myriad of issues.
Understandably, security doesn’t really want non-residents coming inside, (lest they contact Human Rights Watch) but it seems their iron fist extends to anyone trying to walk through the doors.
I was once stopped by the security guard and asked to “prove” that I lived in the building. He couldn’t fathom looking up my name on the spreadsheet directly behind him and insisted he needed to see my keys before I could go upstairs.
I should have taken his advice and left.
So as the frostbite sets in, and the spores begin to take hold in my brain, I ask you to reach out to your friends in John Dodgson. Please check in on us. Make sure we’re still alive.
And when you think you have it rough when your fire alarm goes off at an inconvenient time, remember — it could always be worse.