Hacker News Reader

Comment by atourgates | Hacker News Reader

I’m having a hard time thinking if a “non-nefarious” reason that the facilities supervisor wouldn’t report the body to police?

View on HN

Universities are very "image-conscious."

They rely on appearance and goodwill. No one will send their kids to a school, where homeless people kill each other on campus (which is what this appears to be, but More Will Be Revealed).

I won't speculate, but it seems as if they had simply kept giving jobs to that contractor, it would have remained silent.

I'm surprised no one removed the body, in all that time, though.

But we're talking about UC Berkley here - how image-conscious could they be after they hired John Yoo, the Torture Memo guy?

I don't get the impression the UC Berkeley class is all that squeamish about a few harmless security state shenanigans. The fucking Bushes and Cheneys are being bandied around as the "good guys" now.

But the mentally ill homeless veterans wandering around their kids' campus a couple decades down the road - that's scary, in an immediate, visceral way, for anyone.

Look, someone was told there was a corpse in an abandoned building; but when they tried to put in a ticket for public safety there wasn’t a category for “body found”; so it got kicked back to the supervisor’s intern. It has been resubmitted as a space request for an employee who does not currently have an office, and the body will be moved as soon as its cubicle is setup in a different building && and a laptop is provisioned.

"I want this construction done, and making a big deal out of this body will slow it down considerably."

Having spent most of my career working with colleges and universities, I can absolutely say that speed and efficiency had no role in this.

It was appearances and public image, 100%.

Is that really fair? 100% leaves no room for sheer incompetence and laziness.

(Not all... etc)

Yes. It is fair. There is no way that an institution of higher education thought about efficiency and speed before public image.

I know it's not okay to speak in absolutes, but this might as well be a law.

Colleges and Universities care more about public image than about needless spending, efficiency, and waste.

Their entire existence hinges on their image, especially for elite schools.

It could have nothing to do with speed and efficiency, it could be "this building project gives me more work, I want it done so I can slack off again."

Assume incompetence and work backwards. Maybe he didn't believe the landscapers and didn't want to crawl around under an abandoned building to double check. Maybe he believed them but figured he could get away with ignoring it and not have to deal with yet another problem on his plate. Maybe he kept forgetting about it, even after they reminded him.

Sometimes you just put off sending an email.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com