{"id":98,"date":"2005-05-27T10:47:06","date_gmt":"2005-05-27T14:47:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/snarl\/2005\/05\/27\/welcome-to-the-hotel-harvard\/"},"modified":"2005-05-27T10:47:06","modified_gmt":"2005-05-27T14:47:06","slug":"welcome-to-the-hotel-harvard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/2005\/05\/27\/welcome-to-the-hotel-harvard\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to the Hotel Harvard"},"content":{"rendered":"

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This place never ceases to amaze me. I normally don’t blog about my work evenironment, but an incident that occured yesterday warrants a blog posting.<\/P>
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Around 10:30 in the morning I had to go to the photocopier to make some copies of legal documents associated with Regina’s estate. Being a small academic building, there are only 13 people working on my floor (the fifth and top floor) and the first floor consists soleley of class rooms. Anyway, the photocopier is in it’s own room with a door. <\/P>
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I was apparently the first person to use the copier yesterday because the door was shut. I opened it and went to the copier to warm it up. I didn’t turn on the lights because the lights from the hallway were bright enough for me to see what I needed to see. After a few minutes, the machine had warmed up and I made my copies. I then left the room, leaving the door open. <\/P>
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About 45 minutes later, a co-worker from across the hall came by my office and quietly asked: “Are you aware that there is a man sleeping in the copy room?”<\/P>
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WTF?<\/P>
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So, he and I walk back to the copy room and, lo and behold, there were a pair of legs sticking out from behind the photocopier! Apparently, this co-worker went in there to make some copies, turned on the lights, and then heard some snoring. The police were called and they woke the squatter up. After some loud conversation, he was escorted out of the building. Presumably he was a homeless man finding shelter from the nor’easter we’d been dealing with for the past week. Still, I can’t figure out how he found this building since it’s just outside densely populated Harvard Square. In fact, this building isn’t even on a street…it’s behind a bunch of other buildings.<\/P>
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At the time, I found it quite humorous and was laughing about the situation. But then I started getting somewhat angry. Without going into too much detail, I can say that my floor houses some HIGHLY famous and controversial figures. In fact, they are both just across the hall from me (I can see into their suite from my office door. In the 5 years that I’ve been here, there have been numerous crazy people coming by to get access to these faculty members (we call the police and they get escorted away..sometimes calmly, sometimes screaming). To date, there have been no actual physical assaults. But in addition to the actual visits, the assistants of those faculty members get frequent death threats and hate mail. Interestingly enough, one of the faculty members has practically wall-papered the entrance vestibule to this office with his hate mail. It makes for fascinating reading.<\/P>
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A few years ago, these incidents had increased to the point that a wall was constructed to protect those faculty members and their staff. Of course, nothing was done to protect me. I brought it to the attention of the administation that if people can’t get to see those guys, they’ll just walk into my door (and that is what happens). So, they installed a panic button under my desk that connects right to the police station.<\/P>
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I just don’t understand why this campus (like so many other urban campuses) can’t go to an access card system for entry to the buildings. The dorms already work this way, as do other Harvard colleges. Why are those people’s safety more important than ours? The response I get is that the law school wants to maintain an “open and welcoming” environment. That’s all fine and dandy, but I don’t think it’s necessary to welcome “everybody”. The campus already has an underground tunnel system connected all of the buildings except for the dormitories. Couldn’t there be an access card system to access the surface level entrances and then the entire tunnel network would be accessible without access cards?<\/P>
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Perhaps I’m over-reacting. In this case, it was just a homeless man seeking shelter. This time. But if he found it so easy to find a place to sleep overnight, what’s going to stop somebody with more devious motives? What if I was working alone late the night before and had to make copies? What if this guy was waiting to attack (instead of nap)?  I mean, I was in this room for at least 5 minutes with this guy and had no clue he was there. True, I guess it’s a sign that I should be more observant of my surroundings…but I shouldn’t have to peek behind every door and look behind every trash can before entering a room, either.<\/P>
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I worked for the home office of a retail company in a suburban office park (with no high-profile people) and we had tighter security than this.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This place never ceases to amaze me. I normally don’t blog about my work evenironment, but an incident that occured yesterday warrants a blog posting. Around 10:30 in the morning I had to go to the photocopier to make some copies of legal documents associated with Regina’s estate. Being a small academic building, there are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-98","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}