Dorm Crew

This post is the second of a short series on the students sticking around in Cambridge to help out with class reunions.

They're hard to catch. Show up 15 minutes late, and they've moved on to the next House. They're fast. They're efficient.

These nimble members of Dorm Crew are in charge of stripping the linens from beds after the alumni vacate the rooms.

On this sunny Friday afternoon in Leverett House, Rumbidzai C. Mushavi '12 commanded a team of three—a bit short-handed from the usual eight.

They stormed the room by force, dispersing themselves amongst the bedrooms and reappearing with stripped linens and pillows in hand. The pillows were placed in a plastic bag to be cleaned, and the linens were tied into bundles.

"No linens left behind," one of them joked.

There was no particular quota to meet within a certain time, but they just had to move as quickly as they could.

Every now and then, they found a treasure that the previous occupant left behind. On this day, it was a gray phone charger in Leverett. They tagged it with a Post-it note, wrote down the room number, and took it with them.

Each suite took about four minutes, and once one was done, they raced to the next.

This work, though demanding, was nothing in comparison to Dorm Crew's work the week before Commencement.

In preparation for the reunions, Hui Li "Sharon" Teng '13 was part of a team of 36 students who made 2,800 beds in four days. She said that though each team of two could make a bed in under three minutes, it was running around to all the Houses that limited their average to about six beds an hour.

"The first few days, you're not used to all that manual labor," said Sue L. Dong '13, who was on the cleaning crew for Apley Court and Mass. Hall last week. But the work, she said, quickly became routine.

"I guess what's interesting about the experience was I got learn the importance of work," said Teng. "The captains were pressing us very hard to get everything done very fast."

Photo by Xi Yu/The Harvard Crimson.