Oracle Online

In order to appease the largest amount of people and their temperature preference, it’d be most reasonable to embrace the Goldilocks-ical approach of abandoning extremes and favoring moderate temperatures that seem “just right” to most.

However, there is difficulty in achieving a constant tolerable source of temperature when trying to heat dorms and campus buildings, as evidenced by the blasting heat that sometimes follow periods of radiator abandonment and numbing cold. When the heater kicks in at night, and the freezer pops we’d laid out on the futon in attempt to chill or freeze need to be put back in the fridge, the room is converted from a walk-in freezer to a sauna and back again in a few hours.

Although we appreciate the exercise we get from adjusting the temperature from getting up to open or close the window, climbing down from the bunk to get another blanket or changing back and forth between sweatshirts and swimsuits in order to avoid frost-bitten fingers or heat-boiled organs, a consistent temperature is the desired ideal.

Maintaining a constant comfy warmth is hard to coordinate among numerous campus buildings, so destiny has dictated that students dress in layers, especially when going to class in a room known to have variable temperatures. According to mysterious rumors floating around campus, there are also inexplicable knobs on the heaters that can adjust the amount of heat being released into the room, the effectiveness of which would increase tenfold if they were identified or explained in dorm literature or by residence personnel, though I have yet to visit a dorm room where the knobs actually function or are not broken. Fearing equally both a mild and a harsh winter, students are left to deal with heaters’ extreme temperature ranges that eliminate control over their environment and only allow limited options for comfortable moderation.