Summary

There are constant complaints about the escalators in the NAC breaking down or the power cycle for them being inconsistent. There are other complaints regarding the cleanliness of the escalators as well.

Discussion

The escalators are either breaking down or turning off at certain times of the day. This makes it more difficult for students to make it to their next classes. There appears to be a cycle where certain escalators turn off at specific times of the day. My best guess is that this is done intentionally to save power and money, but we are cutting out the convenience of an escalators for having this. Additionally, escalators breaking down frequently is a large risk for everyone in the building and raises questions about how the escalators are maintained. A student recently complained about finding the remains of a mouse in the crevices of some escalator steps. The fact that no one was quick enough to clean that up before classes started raises questions regarding how sanitary the escalators and the whole building is. If a student was able to spot the remains of a mouse on the escalators, then the janitors were not doing their job to the best of their ability. We need to ensure that we keep not just the escalators, but the entire building clean. Leaving the building in such a condition would push current and future students away from the campus.

Recommendation

We should first address the cleanliness of the escalators. We should either train the current janitors to make them more aware of things to look out for or hire new janitors who take their job more seriously. We should also ask the security guards to keep an eye out since there is usually a security guard near the escalators. Now, in order to address the escalators breaking down, there needs to be enough time put into rebuilding the escalators. The winter or summer breaks would be the optimal times to do this as fewer students are on campus then. The power cycle is the most difficult situation to address as we are cutting corners no matter the approach we take. If we always keep the escalators on, then it is a waste of power and would cost us a considerable amount of money. Sticking to the cycle would be inconvenient for students who need to get to their classes. The best approach would be to only keep the escalators on when classes are going on and turn them off after the last classes of the day end. Going forward, we should consistently perform maintenance on the escalators when most students are on break to ensure that students are in a safe environment when they come back.

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Self-Reflection

I wrote about the functionality and cleanliness of the escalators in the NAC building. My initial inspiration for writing this memo was seeing a tweet from a student showing their disgust in finding the remains of a mouse in the escalator (which I also mentioned in my memo). I became reluctant about writing a memo about the escalators after seeing so many people also share their frustrations with the escalators, but I proceeded to anyways because of that tweet.

The overall message I wanted to communicate was raising awareness about the staff not looking out for the school they work in. Since the focus of my memo was on the escalators, I wanted to raise awareness of how the escalators in the NAC are not well kept and better measures need to be taken to keep them in safer conditions. In the Discussion session of my memo I said, “The fact that no one was quick enough to clean that up before classes started raises questions regarding how sanitary the escalators and the whole building is. If a student was able to spot the remains of a mouse on the escalators, then the janitors were not doing their job to the best of their ability.” I wanted to discuss the student’s discovery of mouse remains to emphasize that the staff, more specifically the janitors, did not do a great job in keeping the escalators clean.

I think the audience would react with shock and they would probably feel offended. To me, my tone seems very harsh and critical so they may take it that I’m accusing them of not doing their job right. I think my recommendations can be viewed as another way of saying “I think I can do your job better than you.” However, I also think that the audience could take the criticism and act upon it, although I don’t think they would take the measures I suggested in my recommendations. When writing this memo, I thought to put myself in the mindset of an angry customer complaining to the manager, so that explains the tone of my memo.

If I were to do something different, it would be to tone down the harshness of my memo and to also reduce the redundancy of it. I noticed that in some areas my memo felt a bit repetitive such as discussing the convenience of the escalators’ power cycle. I also think it would have been better if I separated the functionality of the escalators and the cleanliness of them so that it wouldn’t seem like the escalators have only one problem. This may make the audience think that there isn’t much to do to fix the escalators.