If you are someone at Drew who is currently a freshman or has been here since their freshman year, you will probably be familiar with the water filling stations available both in Tolley-Brown Lounge and in the lobby of Welch Hall. However, you may also be familiar with the fact that these fountains are simply not available in many other dorms, including Baldwin and my current humble abode, Riker.
Hydration is, obviously, a basic human necessity. While there are sinks in each Riker floor lounge, the bulbous Christmas-ornament-sized filters on them do practically nothing – somehow, the Riker 2 faucet is so evil that it renders even some Brita filters useless – and the unfiltered water that does come out of them tastes delectably of microplastics and sadness.
Besides editing with the Acorn and the litany of other things I do on campus — I have been told by every one of my friends that it is far too many, but I refuse to be stopped — I work for the Admissions department. Many of my fellow Admissions employees also live near me in Riker and Baldwin, and we are already paid below minimum wage.
Now, on top of that and paying many thousands of dollars to attend Drew in the first place, I am forced to spend a good half of my paycheck simply on outrageously priced (single-use!) $2-3 plastic water bottles from the vending machine on the ground floor. One night recently, I could not even do that because it had glitched out while installing a software update – who would care to code a whole software update for a vending machine is beyond me, but I digress.
Besides the obvious downside of imminent dehydration, I find it quite alarming to be living in such a technological dystopia that telling my suitemate I was trekking between buildings with my own reusable bottle at 12:30 a.m. in 20 degree weather because “the vending machine can’t find an Internet connection” actually made any sense whatsoever.
While I can and do also use meal swipes to get water bottles from the Ehinger Center food court, they are not a selectable option with every type of meal. To add insult to injury, the ones that are available are also miniscule this year (12 paltry ounces) and single-use plastic yet again. For a school that purports to care about forests so much, Drew uses far too much disposable waste for dining on a daily basis.
This is a fairly easily solvable problem – Drew could take steps to either install a water fountain in each dorm building that does not currently have one, or replace the filters on the sinks with more effective ones and add them if missing. However, no action appears to have been taken as of yet to actually put such a proposal into motion. Thus, for now, my chronic dehydration and I wish you a restful winter break!
Sabr Keres-Siddiqui is a junior majoring in political science and minoring in sociology and anthropology
