Posted: April 25th, 2011 - 8:19am by Doug Powell

Someone blew chunks a month ago in a stairwell between a dining hall at the University of Maryland and offices owned by the student union.

The vomit is still sitting there.

(That’s it on the right, photo by Charlie Deboyace/The Diamondback.)

At Kansas State University, students and faculty are advised to notify the custodial department immediately and to avoid coming into contact with vomit,

John Woods, director of facilities services, says custodians are required to wear gloves, goggles, and a mask. They are supposed to spray the area, wait a few minutes, and scoop the vomit in a plastic bag with paper towels.

Even in Maryland, they probably know how to dispose of vomit. But in a case of bureaucracy trumping public health, the vomit still sits.

As reported by Leah Villanueva of The Diamondback, a student paper at UM, the vomit is in the dining hall building, but dining services spokesman Bart Hipple said, it is actually Stamp Student Union — which owns the dining hall's third-floor office space — that is responsible for keeping the stairwell clean.

"As soon as you walk through those black doors, that's where we end," Hipple said of the doors from the dining area by the Gazebo Room toward the stairway.

But Steve Gnadt, the associate facilities director for Stamp, said the student union is only responsible for the offices and hallways on the building's top floor, which he said are cleaned at least once a day.

In fact, he added, when the counseling center was temporarily moved to the third floor, Dining Services took responsibility for painting over graffiti in one of the building's stairwells.

"That's disgusting. I'm surprised it doesn't smell as bad in here as you think it would," sophomore neurobiology and physiology major Lauren Geffen said. "That's really gross."