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RHA hosts movie office grand reopening

October 29, 2012
Marketing freshman Addisen Carino spots a DVD of "The Office" on Monday, Oct. 29, 2012, in the RHA movie office in the basement of Gilchrist Hall. Carino rented two movies during the re-opening of the movie office: "Dirty Dancing" and "Role Models." Julia Nagy/The State News
Marketing freshman Addisen Carino spots a DVD of "The Office" on Monday, Oct. 29, 2012, in the RHA movie office in the basement of Gilchrist Hall. Carino rented two movies during the re-opening of the movie office: "Dirty Dancing" and "Role Models." Julia Nagy/The State News —
Photo by Julia Nagy | and Julia Nagy The State News

Marketing freshman Addisen Carino and prenursing freshman Katie Justice carefully circled the shelves of movies in the basement of Gilchrist Hall on Monday night, trying to be certain they rented the best movies available.

The two were some of the very first on-campus residents to experience one of the newly improved Residence Halls Association, or RHA, movie offices at the grand reopening this week.

“It was more than I expected,” Carino said. “We’ll be down here a lot.”

This was music to Residence Halls Association, or RHA, Director of Movie Offices Greg Rokisky’s ears after months of work dealing with numerous obstacles.

The movie offices, which allow students to rent movies at five locations, are reopening about a month later than planned after the old system was deemed too out of date for use.

The offices were frequently closed in the last year because of system failures — a problem Rokisky hopes to remedy with the purchase of iPads with the My Movies program for all movie offices.

Rokisky said the iPads are proving far more useful than he thought, with capabilities that make movie office attendants equipped to answer general movie questions about all films, not just those in stock.

He said the programs also have the ability to update directly to the RHA website with what movies have been checked out so far at each location. He said he hopes to have this included on the RHA website by the end of the semester at the latest. The RHA website will soon be revamped and updated, Rokisky said.

“The people who are running (the offices) care about it and want it to succeed,” movie office attendant Elaina Wilson, a media and communication technology senior, said of the main difference between the old movie offices and the revamped ones.

Most students who came to the first movie office grand reopening of the week, such as Carino and Justice, left pleased after enjoying free popcorn, entering a raffle and leaving with the maximum two movies rented for two days.

But not all students left the office as content.

Computer science junior Jacob Riesser said he was frustrated after he biked from Owen Graduate Hall to Gilchrist only to struggle to get into the locked doors of the hall, and out of the cold, to get to the movie offices. Once he made it into the building, he was informed he was unable to rent a movie because as an Owen Graduate Hall resident, he had not paid a $25 RHA tax.

Rokisky said students in halls such as Owen are welcome to opt into the tax at the RHA office in Holden Hall. He also said those concerned with the issue are welcome to voice their opinions at one of the weekly RHA meetings.

Although several students, such as elementary education freshman Haley Nixon, said many students might not have a use for the newly improved movie offices because of movie viewing programs such as Netflix, other students seemed confident many students still benefit from the offices’ presence on campus and felt it should be advertised more to students.

In the first hour of the grand reopening, about 12 students rented from the Gilchrist movie office location, although some said they didn’t get the movie they came for because it wasn’t in stock.

Rokisky said his next goal is to add newer movies to the selection by the end of this semester or the next.

“It’s exceeding everything (I hoped for),” Rokisky said. “One person (renting) would have been awesome.”

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