Varda Gupta let the door close behind her and immediately realized her mistake.
Her room key was still inside her single dorm room.
Much to Gupta’s surprise, the front desk could not give her a new key; instead, a resident director escorted her upstairs to let her back inside, using the master key.
And Gupta, a second-year business economics student, was not the only one. All day Friday, any students locked out of their rooms had to be brought back upstairs and let inside by resident directors because new keys could not be made while the Internet server was down on the Hill.
A conduit located between the Rieber and De Neve residential buildings containing the Internet and cable wires for the Hill was accidentally cut by a construction crew on Friday around 10 a.m., said Mark Direske, manager of Infrastructure Project Engineering and Management for the Communications and Technology Services department.
The Internet and cable were cut off for the entire Hill, except for Sproul Hall, Covel Commons and Sunset Village, until early Saturday morning. Students could relocate to these halls for Internet access as long as they had a laptop that could connect to the Wi-Fi.
Office of Residential Life workers heard the majority of the students’ complaints on Friday. By Friday evening, many of the libraries had closed, so students didn’t know where else to turn for Internet access, said Anmy Vu, a resident director of Hedrick Hall.
“People (couldn’t) do their homework and (didn’t) know what to do,” Vu said.
The lack of Internet may not have been a total loss for the students of Dykstra Hall. Instead of studying for midterms for the night, they developed connections the old-fashioned way, via face-to-face interaction.
Anna McKee and her friends had already planned to hold a tea party that evening on their floor, complete with tea and crackers, Chinese checkers and a tea party playlist cranking in the background. With the Internet down, McKee said more students were wandering the halls and took part in their floormates’ festivities.
“I found out I was not the only tea drinker on the floor that evening,” McKee said.