Welcome back from Spring Break everyone! Is there anything better than coming back to school with midterms and papers weighing you down? Of course there is! There's coming back, with all those assignments due when the AU server crashes. Awesome!
I am forced to write this column instead of writing a scary midterm because, once again, the woeful state of AU's technology has been exposed. Is anyone else sick of this? Walking out of the Anderson Computer Lab, I learned something a little scary. No one was angry. They saw this turn of events as just another obstacle thrown by AU at its students/paying customers. After all, most of them had the option of doing work in their residence hall room or their apartment. Life goes on.
That's not right. Life doesn't always go on in these situations. Some of us don't have Microsoft Word. My stupid bargain computer has WordPerfect, which is a total joke. Some of us don't have printers. Some of us, and I pulled this off for a whole semester last year, don't even have computers. Some of us depend on the computer labs. It's only fair, considering that my tuition goes into those damned white rooms.
What do we get in return? Really nice chairs and really terrible technical problems. Sometimes it's the server. I had the frustrating pleasure of having my computer crash while I was in the process of saving something. That's always a fun time. Other times it's the printers. Surely most of my readers can relate to waiting over an hour for their big important paper to print. Either half the printers are down or they all run out of ink at the same flippin' time.
It would be ridiculous of me to blame the fine employees of the computer labs. They seem to be sympathetic, which is a nice touch. I could blame the employees if the same problems didn't plague our residence hall room computers as well. I'm not even going to touch the creepy MARS surveillance stuff that this school involves itself in. OK, yes I am. I must say, I am pretty uncomfortable with the school knowing what Web sites I browse. If I like midget sex, that's really my business. If I want to go to Web sites that tell me how to make pipe bombs, that's my business too.
Unfortunately, this is a moot point. I can't look at midget sex or become a novice terrorist because our Internet connection is broken half the time! I left my computer on for the duration of spring break just so I could leave a humorous and informative away message. I get back, and I see that I was online for less than a day before I got kicked off. I agree with you if you're saying that's a ridiculous complaint. But it's still a valid one! It seems as if the Internet here is either not working at all or is just moving slower than cancer.
Well, I have to go call the computer lab to see if the server is back up. I almost hope it isn't. If everything is in working order, this column will seem especially crotchety. I would hate to seem crotchety.
I leave you all with a congratulations for our basketball teams, especially the men's team which has been on national TV for three years in a row. That's more than Holy Cross or Lehigh can lay claim to. And at least we're not from Bethlehem, Pa. Yuck.
