I've just moved in to my dorm for the 2008-2009 school year here at Bates. By and large, I like the room assigned to me by the housing office. I have a single in the fancy new yet-to-be-named dormitory. Given the building's youth, the walls remain blissfully whole, the baseboard does not crawl with dust, and the furniture does not look dated or overused. For the most part, it's quite nice.

Unfortunately, however, one of the building's greatest virtues is also its greatest vice.

This new dormitory, following Bates' obsession with environmentalism, has a number of features that make it very energy efficient. The lights in the bathrooms dim automatically after motion sensors detect a certain level of inactivity. A fancy ventilation system cools and heats the building with great efficiency. And the windows have a metallic coating to keep heat out in the summer and keep heat in during the winter.

But the windows' metallic coating keeps out more than just heat. It also reflects the microwaves cell phone's use to send and receive phone calls. Thus, no matter where I stand inside, I have absolutely, positively zero reception on my trusty iPhone. Apparently, this has posed a problem to big businesses as well. On the one hand, they want to sell themselves as environmentally responsible by improving the energy efficiency of their offices. On the other, however, cell phones and their derivatives, are essential to business in the new millennium.

The solution, according to what I've read, is to install special repeaters, leased from the cell carriers, inside buildings to ensure phones work.

But it makes more sense, at least in a building like mine with great WiFi reception inside, to simply give cell phones the ability to make calls over the Internet using a WiFi chipset. T-Mobile already offers a service along those lines, however, users must install a special WiFi access point and use a specific phone designed for WiFi-GSM hand-offs. Carriers could still bill customers for minutes talked over WiFi. I would not object to that. I do, however, object to having absolutely no cell reception inside.