System Crash Reveals the Centre College Standard

Tuesday, November 11 was like Black Tuesday for those Centre students who were looking to use their emails. The whole system crashed and had to be taken down quickly.

The whole instance started when a student decided to send a mail to everyone on campus with details about a new dance club, however instead of mass mailing it she added the entire campus's names to the forwarding list. I am sure it was an honest mistake, but it was certainly not a good idea because then everyone on campus had the campus email of everyone else.

That same night, a student named Zack S. replied to all to say "Hey everyone, have a great Tuesday!" and, following this standard, a Daniel F. did the same with responding "I second Zack! Enjoy fall all."

This may seem like an honest mistake to many of you and like nothing that is of utmost importance, but the events that transpired the next day, on that Black Tuesday, made many think about the actual intelligence of the staff at Centre College.

One Chris Y. took the time to email to all in order to comment, "Well ahmmm...you must be a FRESHMAN if I am not mistaken. This was the worst idea in the history of Centre College." This, in turn, received several comments that, not only replied to all, but commented on how rude the statement was.

And now for the worrying part.

There were 11 people that emailed asking to be taken off the list, replying to all as they did so, and only further increasing the overload of the system. The head swim coach was first to start this tirade, declaring, "I don't know how I got on this list but please remove me from it!"

This was followed by the Associate Softball Head Coach, the Visit Coordinator, a woman in the Development Office, and one more staff member (who was finally the last) who also asked to be removed from the list, each one in turn replying to all believing they were on some sort of mailing list.

Finally, the Head of ITS sent everyone an email saying, "You have not been added to a list! Two students sent e-mails to everyone in the address book last night, which were then replied to by other students magnifying the problem. You have not been added to a list, and ITS will be dealing with the situation."

Even once this email was sent out, there were still another 7 Centre students who replied asking to be removed from the list as well, showing that the email from ITS was largely ignored.

I know that I am not alone in worrying about the standard of both Centre students and staff when the school claims to be so elite and tries to boast about the wisdom of both their staff and students when neither could figure out that A) there was no mailing list, it was just the 1700 names of everyone on campus and B) emailing those 1700 people to ask to be taken off the list isn't going to help the situation any.

It seems to me that this situation could have easily been resolved if people had just stopped to think about the intensity of what they were doing. By not mass mailing, the system reads that list of names and, instead of sending out one email to everyone at the same time, they go name by name and send out an email to each person on the list individually. This continues every time the message is replied to, etc, and so the work load is only increased exponentially with the times people reply to the message.

Now, I'm not saying that people are perfect on any campus because that certainly isn't true, but seeing first-hand how much Centre plays up their rank and such I feel that it is an important judge of character of the college, overall, to know that such a crucial bit of common sense is lacking in both the staff and the student body.