Closing

Friday was the last day of classes. In less than a week, we'll be closing the building.

I just spent the past hour putting together our Closing Binder. Closing is one of those things that should be simple and straight-forward but it never is. RAs forget to do something when checking out a resident. Residents say they are ready to check out but half their belongings are still in the room. Keys disappear. Trash rooms get - well, trashed.

I'm trying to be as organized as possible. RAs are assigned to specific jobs and I've stressed several times how important it will be to pay attention to every detail. I also made checklists that they can take with them when checking a room. My grads and I will also be double-checking every room before turning it over to Housekeeping.

Everything will be a little more stressful because we are housing parents of graduates for Commencement in my building. That means the Housekeeping staff needs to clean all of our rooms and common areas between Friday night and Saturday at noon. My staff and I will have to be even more on top of our work to make sure that we can turn rooms over as early as possible to the Housekeeping staff.

I'm not really nervous about Closing. I've closed buildings for several years now. But I'm also not really looking forward to it. Every year, I've run into some problems with RAs. Last year, for example, some of them forgot to check if residents had cleaned out the refrigerators - so I had to send them back to the room to clean those fridges before turning the rooms over to Housekeeping (after all, it wouldn't be fair to make Housekeeping pay for our mistakes). Then two keys were missing - we found them in the end but there was a few very uncomfortable conversations and a very upset and defensive RA. I'd really love to end with the staff on a positive note; so let's all keep our fingers crossed that we won't have any of these issues this year.