A home away from home; that’s what many ISU students expect when they move into the residence halls at Iowa State.

Cable TV, Internet, phone lines – the bare essentials to live comfortably away from Mom and Dad.

And it’s all promised in the Department of Residence contract students sign before moving in. For a simple fee students have access to all the basic cable channels and Internet services they could want. Even the phone service is provided at a reduced rate.

Mom and Dad would be jealous.

Unless they were still living in temporary housing four months after classes began.

Forget the amenities of home; these floor dens don’t even provide closets, shelves or regular desks with drawers in them.

Not to mention having three extra roommates and one phone line. So much for talking to the boyfriend back home until 2 a.m.

Oh, and the basic cable and Internet services – not accessible. Den hookups don’t comply with the regular service and cost extra to activate.

So students decorate their den-rooms, navigate around their extra roommates and pay their fees for the semester.

The same fees that are supposed to provide them with basic cable TV and Internet services in the regular rooms. The same service fees that can’t be applied to temporary housing in floor dens.

There is always the possibility students will live in temporary housing when they first move into the residence halls. The Department of Residence can’t know which students will decide to move off campus, into the greek system or back home, so they try to accommodate everyone as well as they can.

But when students are expected to live in temporary housing more than half the semester, some special consideration should be made.

It’s one thing to not be able to find them a room. It’s another to charge them room fees for services they can’t access.

In the Nov. 1 Daily story, “Nearly 100 still in temp housing,” Paul Dosch, business operations manager for the Department of Residence, said it would be almost impossible to figure out which students should be reimbursed for the fees and how much the amount should be.

If customer satisfaction is a goal of the Department of Residence, this justification doesn’t cut it. It may be difficult to reimburse everyone for the fees they’ve paid, but after four months, some kind of compensation should be made. If the money isn’t being used for cable and Internet services, where is it going? Why can’t it be used to reimburse students, or at least pay to activate basic cable in the dens?

This may take extra effort, but it’s all about making the customer happy.

Students should be able to get what they paid for.

editorialboard: Andrea Hauser, Tim Paluch, Michelle Kann, Zach Calef, Omar Tesdell