Dear Dick,
You general failure.You ID10T error. You have less intelligence than a floppy disk and more bugs than a high school computer lab. If I was to insult you in your own language, I could only call you one thing: 0110110101101111011100100110111101101110 (you MORON).
Dick, you frustrate me on every turn. A hovering entity made up of lost computer data and student frustration. YOU are not just the road not traveled, but the website not found, the Error 404 message in the middle of the path.
As for your latest bug in my proverbial web-browsing soup, all I can say is that I am sick and tired of your prevalent presence in my life, particularly in the course of signing up for classes.
Why, I dare ask, do I have to have four windows open in order to make any progress on the campus website? It is as though you were a road atlas in another life, or perhaps the half-breed offspring of a thesaurus and a “Choose Your Own Adventure” novel put into code and left to rot in the recycle bin.
Each tab is a mockery of my intelligence, telling me, “No,of course there is no easy route to getting ready for spring semester. If you want to succeed, you have to do it MY way.”
But your way is as old as the dinosaurs and made up of the same programming format as that which existed when I first began college, a date which will never slip past my lips.
One page to add/drop classes, one to do a class search, one carrying my degree requirements and one with the description of each class. Each is a tiresome stumbling stone to flip back and forth between. And even should I know the exact name of each class, CRN included, still I must search them out in the traditional stone aged method: by subject and title.
Make a spelling mistake and you’re lost.
And pity the poor student who doesn’t know to look for ART classes under Visual Art and Design.
Only longtime experience with you, you foul mechanical beast, allows me any semblance of understanding your tangled Web. But what of the ‘noobs,’ the poor scholarly greenhorns with neither a map nor a guide? How can you treat them like this? Why do you take such joy in internet crashes and the persistent insistence that passwords be eight characters, and ONLY eight characters long?
I am past despising you, Dear Dick. I can only hope that I won’t have to deal with you any longer and cross my fingers that eventually some dragon-slaying programmer will take up the cause.
Sincerely,
M. Bennett