ive ended up in a bit of hot water. my first student dorm was awful, but i had already paid for 6 months and there was no option for refunds. i asked my university to move to a different one, thinking i had already seen the worst of the worst (and my university had a big sook about how this was an exception among exceptions and wouldn’t happen again).
(sorry in advance for the long post btw, it’s a
bit of a story).
somehow, the new dorm is worse. the first dorm had a strong draft and limited me to 50gb of data for a month instead of providing actual wifi like promised, and now the first thing i get told when i see the new room is that there’s no air conditioning. everything i hated about the old place is just as bad in the new place, there’s only a few showers in the entire building, and they’re all kept on one floor, there’s only one bidet and its broken, and the toilets are all-round disgusting, i can here every single noise coming from the pantry and there’s constant banging and slamming all around me. it’s not unliveable but it’s really unpleasant.
so i talked to my university again and said it wasn’t possible for me to stay here, least of all without any heating. once again they made a big sook; apparently since i agreed to move here and put my name down on a piece of paper (just my name, not my signature) i am now trapped here for eternity and i should be grateful rather than complaining about it. i haven’t even paid yet. i did a bit of googling and it turns out with no air conditioning they do need to provide a replacement room, a fix, compensation, or allow me to cancel. so i figured i’d call them out on it and use that as an excuse to leave, since they were being uncooperative otherwise.
i agreed to move in back in january, and now i’m here in march, for some reason given the room with no air conditioning when there are clearly plenty of empty rooms i could’ve been given instead. the dorm manager wasn’t even surprised it was broken, i strongly got the sense that the thing was only fixed cause i complained about it. they’ve had three months to make sure stuff like this wouldn’t happen and yet here i am suffering the consequences of their… laziness? i can only assume. but i don’t have objective evidence to prove that its been that long. all i can say is that the air conditioning hasn’t been working since i arrived here 1 week ago, and i’ve only been offered a temporary replacement room to sleep in since then. so i figured if i want to be reasonable and have a strong case for myself i should at least give them until the end of the week to fix it, but tell them ill be moving out if they can’t do it before then.
now the dorm manager tells me he’s getting people in TOMORROW. my japanese isn’t very good so i don’t know if he means to inspect it or to replace the thing completely (according to the last technician that looked at it, fixing isn’t possible), but im worried that as soon as its fixed, i’ll no longer have any excuse to leave. my remaining complaints are serious to me, the person who has to live here – stuff like the plug for the sink, which doesn’t fit, the constant construction noises, the light in the room which was installed what feels like centuries ago and has a rusted metal cord that i really dont want to touch attached to it – but to someone on the outside, these are cosmetic issues that aren’t serious enough to break agreement on.
so, if they do fix the AC, am i stuck here? forced to pay and deal with the rest even though i don’t like it? is there anything they can do if i tell them “sorry, i’m moving here instead, i’ll pay for the time i stayed but stay no longer!”
tldr; i got stuck with a shitty dorm, but without legal leverage i’m worried they won’t let me leave.
by Blue-tsu