By Chris Sabanty

When Northeastern decided to replace traditional keys for the new West Village buildings, it probably seemed like a good idea.

Why should we hand out small keys that often get lost and need to be replaced? Students won’t lose their Husky Cards. Husky Cards are like a debit card. Plus, if students lost their “key,” residence halls wouldn’t have to deal with it. It probably seemed like a good idea.

Unfortunately, the system is a little flawed. In just one semester, there have been plenty of problems. It started about a month ago for me.

My roommate and I returned one night and discovered that our door wouldn’t open. Apparently, the card-reader was confused. Since the bolt was physically in place, we couldn’t open the door. But because the bolt wasn’t completely pushed in, the card-reader assumed that the door was open. Because of this, the card-reader remained turned off. Of course, this wouldn’t be a problem if my other roommates were home. But on a Friday or Saturday night, this can’t be assumed. And, as chance would have it, none of my other roommates were home. So we waited. We waited for about two hours until the only person that could fix our problem arrived. That was only the beginning.

My second problem occurred just recently. My old Husky Card had been scratched up to the point where it wouldn’t scan at most places on campus. So I went to get a new one. Unfortunately, when I slid it in the reader, it wouldn’t scan. To work as a key card, each Husky Card has to be encoded. My problem was that nobody working had the authority to encode it. So I waited, again. I waited another two hours before the only person that could encode it arrived.

I’ve had two problems after a little over one semester of living here. With a full year of having a normal key, I didn’t have one problem.

Maybe I’m an isolated incident. Maybe everyone loves not having to carry a set of keys with them. But I’m sure there have been other problems. I’m sure there are other people that have had to wait, too.

My question is: Why not keep traditional keys? Sure, it probably looks impressive on a tour. But until the system is improved or the authority is increased, why keep something that only creates another problem for students? I don’t know if anyone else has my plight, but this is a nuisance that shouldn’t exist. We have plenty of things to deal with, getting into our rooms shouldn’t be one of them.

— Chris Sabanty is a sophomore computer science major.