Rusty Tassini has seen it all.

He’s seen things he expects to see, such as plugged toilets, faulty heaters and broken light bulbs. But he has also gotten some surprises, like sink holes that create large tunnels under apartments, collapsed rooftops and dorm room walls that students dismantled to create a makeshift suite between them and their neighbors.

In the end, it’s just a day’s work for the housing maintenance manager of FIXit. The Syracuse University Housing and Food Maintenance department, better known as FIXit, is in charge of maintaining residence and dining halls on Main and South campuses. While the job of repairing buildings seems pretty cut and dry, the 147 workers of FIXit have become the omniscient eyes and ears of SU residence life.

‘We find all kinds of things in rooms: bongs, pipes, alcohol – sometimes we go into an apartment on South and find pets like dogs and cats running around,’ said Jimmy Taylor. ‘There’s no procedure for when we find things. I mean, if there was, then students wouldn’t call FIXit when they need something and we’re here to serve the students and make them happy.’

That also sums up the mission statement that is posted in the entrance of the FIXit headquarters: ‘We are service to the students of Syracuse University with pride and commitment using teamwork, trust and respect.’

FIXit headquarters, housed in the Carriage House on Farm Acre Road, resembles an ambulance dispatch center. Phones are ringing off the hook as workers swarm in and out of the office, answering calls and jumping into their vans.

Tassini said on average, the house gets about 150 calls a day, but during the winter months there tend to be more due to heat-related issues.

‘Anything that can go wrong we have a call on,’ said Thelma Schrag, the dispatcher at the Carriage House. ‘Slocum Heights has gas stoves so when students smell gas, that’s an emergency call so we send someone right over.’

Schrag said one of the most frequent calls she answers on weekend mornings are vomit cleanup in residence halls and toilet clogs and overflows due to vomit. The overflowed toilets take priority over say, a puddle on the ground.

Another common issue is students losing keys, causing FIXit to change the locks, Schrag said. The lost keys get put in a bucket that fills up over time. A large plastic bin sits behind Schrag’s desk containing hundreds of keys from last semester. The bin is taken in for recycling after it’s filled.

The bucket of fallen keys is just the beginning of the daily debacles that FIXit faces.

A usual day at the office begins around 6:30 a.m. when Tassini, along with the other managers, looks over all the in-sheets they got from the day before, searching for any problems that need to be dealt with immediately or followed-up on. There are also many e-mails and estimates to review, as well as renovation projects that are worked on daily.

One of the projects that FIXit oversees is the four-year renovation of Lawrinson Hall. Tassini said the project that started on the 20th floor of the building will include remodeling the bathroom space, shortening the trek to the laundry room by removing it from the basement and placing laundry facilities on each floor, revamping the public space, and using natural light in the hallways.

Another renovation project FIXit is working on is creating a floor plan to convert Haven Dining Center into housing after Ernie Davis Hall is opened this fall.

‘We’ve got a killer floor plan put together for Haven Dining,’ said J.D. Tessier, the head manager of FIXit. ‘When the new dining hall goes up for Ernie Davis, we’re converting the space into some suites.’

But while Tessier looks forward to projects ahead, his former years at FIXit have created many memories.

One of the more bizarre telephone calls that Tassini and Tessier remember was about a sinkhole under one of the Slocum Heights apartments. When he went to investigate, what he found was more than typical patchwork.

‘When we got in with the flashlights, actually half the ground under the Slocum Heights apartment had actually washed away. And you could shine a flashlight all the way through and walk underneath. It was not what we were expecting,’ Tassini said.

That has happened a number of times because South Campus was built on Drumlins, which is glacier-made, so there are a lot of cavities in the ground, he said.

A scarier, more extended project came in 1998, when what Tessier called a mini-tornado occurred right after Labor Day. Six buildings in Slocum Heights were razed. Tessier said buildings had collapsed and some students, though unharmed, had to be taken out of the rubble.

‘Some people were hiding in the closet because the roof had gone out,’ said Tessier.

The apartments were repaired the following year and students were moved to various parts of campus, including hotels.

Tassini looks back on this time fondly as he says seeing the community pull together after the incident was remarkable. People from the Syracuse community were also housed in the Archbold Gymnasium on campus.

On a lighter note, Tassini says he’s constantly impressed by the ways that students try to beat the system. He recalls walking into dorm rooms for a call and finding entire walls between rooms and apartments gone, creating a walkway into the neighbor’s apartment.

‘We have a lot of clever students here, engineering students, or I guess you can say lucky that they didn’t get zapped by an electrical wire in the wall,’ he said.

Another more common trick comes from students living on South Campus, who attempt to raise the temperature in their apartment by placing icepacks on the sensors in their room, or reworking the sensors through their refrigerators.

Tessier said the hardest part of his job was dealing with people who were unwilling to work with FIXit workers. He said they have their own concept of what they want to happen and tend to be very demanding.

Despite some attitudes though, Tassini said he loves his job.

‘Other than very few problems, I’d say the students are universally great,’ Tassini said. ‘We like to call ourselves the mothers and fathers of this place. I think that’s a pretty accurate statement.’

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Published on January 20, 2009 at 12:00 pm