Lunacy and Incompetence

Frame-Enhanced Version

• CHAT's administrators have no clue how to deal with abuse of their system by a small cabal of students. A clique of about a dozen students have terrorized the system and completely dominated the carleton.* newsgroups for ages and they haven't lifted a finger.
• Carleton U hikes tuition fees, cuts back services, and claims they have insufficient money to do otherwise. They start offering some higher mathematics courses only in alternating years (and then inconsistently at that).
  Then, in the late summer of 1998, they tear up three walkways (making it hard for summer studentsto attend end-term exams in certain campus locations) and the facade of the Steacie building and rebuild these. If they're so strapped for cash they had to cut back essential services and hike fees, where the hell did they get the money to finance these expensive- looking cosmetic renovations? Why not spend that money where it's sorely needed, on essential services? Is someone lying to us about the financial situation at the university? It makesyou wonder.
• In the winter of 1996-1997, the maintenance department sorely neglected the exterior walkways, not putting any salt or sand down at all, nor shoveling snow. Many students reported contracting minor injuries such as sprained ankles that winter due to this negligence. If there had been any broken bones, the maintenance department would have discovered that penny-pinching to the point of neglecting essential services can be costlier than just doing the bloody work, when the verdict came in from the class-action lawsuit that would have occurred.
  In the winter of 1997-1998, there was some evidence of a halfhearted attempt to shape up this service: occasional snowplowing of the major rads (but not the paths or grounds) and occasional sprinkling of SafeT salt (imagine a small hole in the snow with a single salt crystal at the bottom, with these spaced several meters apart, on some of the more frequently used walkways).
• Computer lab facilities have not adequately expanded to meet demand.
• Computer lab facilities have abysmal qualities. Computers break down a lot (the MTBF of a box seems to go down a factor of 20 when it is installed in a campus lab; vandals, presumably, are responsible, and never get caught enough to be deterred), and when they do they aren't fixed for weeks or months at a time. The printers are slow, wonky, a decade or two obsolete, and also prone to frequent failures. When they "upgraded" some of them to Windows NT, it solved some problems but created others, and solved none of the problem of persistent, frequent hardware failure there. An example of a problem created by the NT switch is that now if the NT server crashes (a weekly event at best), all of the campus labs, except those using the older, crufty Windows 3.1 based system, become unusable. The 2 mistakes made by the admins: No backup server, and too much dependence on the server by the individual lab machines, which were not nearly so networking dependent before the switch. All of this headache in order to avoid the recurrence of a virus infection the previous year. They would have saved a lot of time, headaches, and money (money sent to Microsoft!) if they had just gotten W95 and a decent antivirus package instead.
• The campus phone network is wonky. Operator and directory assistance don't work from a campus phone, except for the pay phones located in building lobbies, due to some bug in the PBX system they set up. To place a free phone call from campus to a number you don't know, you have to wander until you find a pay phone and phone 411 (which is free except for home phones) and get the number, then find a free phone (usually these are in obscure lkecture halls on the 3rd and 4th floor of a campus building for some unfathomable reason) and actually place the call, assuming you haven't forgotten the hard-won phone number by now. This is slow, inconvenient, and non-intuitive. There should be a free phone close to the lobby in the halls on the ground floor of every building, and it should accept placing calls to 411 or the operator.
• Vandalism: Free phones, elevators, campus computers, vending machines, and other machines on campus, are all frequently vandalized (usually in a violent and final fashion using ablunt object) and the Campus Safety people seem incapable or possibly unwilling to do anything about it. (Perhaps they get more in insurance than the things were worth? They certainly don't care when disabled students can't attend class for a week because of a vandalized elevator, or they feed quarters into the local phone monopoly because a free phone was smashed.)
  Worse, they often don't bother fixing the things. Two freephones in the unicenter have been vandalized in recent years, and in each case, the smashed and useless piece of junk is still sitting there. The idiots have not yet bothered replacing either of them and both were damaged over a year ago. They don't get around to fixing broken elevators, computers, or vending/change machines for days or weeks, when they should do something the same day it is vandalized.
• A lot of campus elevators are slow and wonky. Many will go in the wrong direction when called (e.g. elevator idle on the 4th floor, guy strolls up to ground floor call button and pushes it, and the rustbucket promptly wakes up and goes up to the 5th floor) or when used (e.g., you press up on the 2nd floor. Elevator (eventually) arrives. You enter, push 4, and it goes down), and none except in the arts tower and admin building (naturally) move very fast (seems the rest date back to the 40s and 50s and nobody's bothered to replace them with modern models). Only the one in the admin building works perfectly; the rest exhibit software bugs even if they aren't slow.
  There are several elevator call butons that have been broken for years and have gone unfixed; the Paterson Hall elevator call button on the 2nd floor doesn't work, nor does the ground floor Unicenter call button. (At the latter, fortunately, people take the elevator down to the ground floor often enough that you can get a ride if you just wait a while. A long while. Be sure to bring a good book...with at least 50 unread pages.)
• Campus change machines. All from the same manufacturer. All of them prone to breakdowns, above and beyond those caused by vandalism. The manufacturer has even put a blinking yellow light on the machine's console with "Out of service" written underneath, apparently aware of the buckets of bolts' unreasonably tiny MTBF. Why the moronic manufacturer didn't make the rusty things more robust and reliable is beyond me. No sane and rational mind can explain why the university admins chose the world's least reliable brand of change machine either.
• Empty food vending machines go hours or even days before being refilled. Someone ought to check the machines are not getting low on anything a few times a day, and top up the machine anytime something gets low or at the closing time, using the copious piles of packaged food stored in maintenance closets near the machines. This is only a few minutes of additional work a day after all.
• The registration booklet frequently contains misprints and errors. In the fall of 1998, the first print run contained a glaring error putting a math lecture on a Wednesday that was scheduled on Thursdays. A later print run printed a batch with the correct date. Why those of us (including as it happens, me) who received older, erroneous copies weren't notified when they found the bug and sent a new copy, or at least an errata pamphlet, is beyond me.
• Classes sometimes abruptly change location. There is no rational reason for this (since course timetables and room assignments are made months before the start of a term and they've had plentyof time to get it right and settle on a final arrangement). But it happens, and it happens frequently enough they actually mass-produce stickers saying "Room Change" with class and location blanks just for the occasion! These are supposed to be stuck on the entrances of a room when a class normally held there is inexplicably relocated, but frequently aren't, leaving students to search the whole campus frantically for someone with information about thje new location. (Those who have gotten to know many classmates or a prof or TA personally are lucky in these situations; those who have just been attending, doing the work, and the like are not so fortunate.)
• Information Carleton is never very informative. They also exhibit some degree of bias, racial and of other sorts, in whom they will serve and how politely/informatively. To my knowledge, they never have a clue about anything going on on campus except for the narrow department of supplying phone numbers of various services, departments, and faculty; and there is a phone booklet you can get that does the same job adequately, and with a lot less fuss and inconvenience.
• Someone, with regard to misprints and errata in the registration manual, suggested that new students always read every single article on every bulletin board on campus on the first day of a term in case there's something about changed dates, times, class locations, or other information. This seems a bit silly and highly impractical; after all, there are thousands of square meters of bulletin board all over campus, with 99% of the articles posted on these irrelevant to any particular person. The whole point of the mailed registration package is to ensure all students receive all the information they need (and that they get it accurately)!
• This year they silently changed the policy for applying for student loans. They now required students to show up before 8:30 am(!) and get a "ticket" and then return later in the afternoon, then stand in the lineup and present the ticket when their turn came to receive their application forms. Since they neglected to announce this anywhere, they essentially made the procedure as follows: Student goes, and gets turned away at the door and told to come back in the enxt few days before 8:30; then they come back another day to do the actual deed. This is ridiculous, especially because many students are away or don't have transportation to campus arranged before September, so that leaving and coming back again on a later day becomes a major hassle. (This administrative idiocy has to be done in late August.)
  This is of course neglecting to mention that the entire system for applying for and receiving a student loan is obsolete and has been for many years. The entire system could be done by computer, the way course registration now is, far more efficiently and with far less hassle; moreover, such a system would be a lot less error prone.
• The bus service to the campus is slow, unreliable, and worse, bus service from the west end is unavailable throughout the summer months. Some idiot doesn't seem to realize that there are students in the west end with no car that might wish to take summer courses! The bus system should be more reliable overall, but especially when it goes to campuses and peoples' work places, as people can miss assignments, miss exams, fail, or get fired from work if the bus system persistently makes them late or fails to work entirely. And the university powers that be ought to pressure the bus system to fix these problems, and particularly to provide full service to the university from the entire city throughout the year.
  It is also a problematic state of affairs that many regions of the city are three or more buses from campus. All locations should be at most two buses from campus (this is true for Ottawa U, so why not Carleton U?). People with an 8:30 class in one of the three-bus zones may have to get up as early as 5:30 to make it to class on time! This is accounting for the notoriously poor meshing of OC buses, which causes a 3-bus trip anywhere in this city to be 1.5-2 hours all told when the buses are on time, and allowing for a half hour due to slowness/lateness/missing buses and another half hour to hurriedly get ready before leaving.
• Vandalism is not the only thing Campus Safety can't or won't stop. Assorted physical assaults occur on campus from time to time. Nobody is ever caught, despite the (sparsely-placed and usually broken) rape/assault alarms.
• Some utter and complete genius (note: dripping with sarcasm) had the brilliant idea last year of moving the campus health department from its convenient, central location to the snazzy new building they built recently (with the money they supposedly don't have) at the edge of campus about a kilometer from the center of the action. Nobody has yet realized how inconvenient it is for students to walk an average of over half a klick to the new building to go to health services from just about anywhere else on campus they are likely to be.
• The campus parking people are anal-retentive and greedy. Parking rates are worse than they are in the heart of downtown; because they have a captive market they bleed people for every penny they can get their greedy grubby mitts on. And of course they have safety officers spend more time in the lucrative business of hunting down parking violators and ticketing them than locating vandals and rapists.
  One time last winter, I watched a parking officer ticket car after car parking in a certain snow-covered parking spot beside the Loeb building. Curious as to why, I waited until nobody was around and the space was empty and pushed the snow around. Under the eight centimeters of snow, where nobody except Superman could see it, was a blue wheelchair symbol. There was no sign sticking above snow level. This looked to me like anal retentiveness bordering on a deliberate scam.
  Metered parking spaces have a sign that disallows parking at failed meters. Greedy scrooges! If a meter fails, it won't earn you any money anyways, so it certainly harms nobody and is more efficient to let people use the space for free. (Would also give them incentive to fix things faster when they break!) But oh, no, they just can't stand the thought of anyone getting to park on campus without paying an arm and a leg to the Parking Nazis first. Even if it's because they forgot to follow the monthly maintenance directions and replace the money filter and oil the framistat monthly as a cost-cutting measure. And if they are afraid someone will vandalize a meter in order to get free parking, note that the meters are encased in solid thick steel with thick shatterproof plastic over the meter displays, and are generally extremely robust in exactly the way the delicate elevator electronics, freephones, and vending and change machines aren't.
• Vending machines and pay phones on campus frequently eat money without delivering a product, or don't give correct change (generally by giving less than the correct amount).
• Drink vending machine in athletics building charges two dollars for everything; it is one dollar anywhere else on campus. This is obviously intentional, and is a low and scummy and ethically dubious thing to do. They are preying on the people that are worked-up and thirsty from athletics activity, by forcing them to either walk a long way to another part of campus (Athletics is as isolated as the health services office) or accept a price-gouging of the most heinous sort.
• Campus bookstore prices are enormous; as they have a captive market and a monopoly, they proce-gouge to an extreme even Microsoft can't beat. They also engage in dubious business practises to maintain their monopoly. There were numerous threats and other underhanded deals by which they make other chains of bookstores in town stay off their turf and not sell any academic books. It's nearly as nasty as drug dealers' tactics at eliminating their competition. That the city and country government has put up with this is amazing. If Microsoft did something of the sort, the US Department of Justice would have Bill Gates' head on a (figurative) pike faster than you could say "Who you gonna call? Trust Busters!"
• In the same vein, the campus bookstore's service sucks. For some reason, they generally have only one or two cashiers manning the cash even attimes of peak demand in early September and early January. Worse, their security is anally-retentive to the point that it seriously inconveniences legitimate shoppers (and makes them feel like criminals or suspects) while obviously not bothering thieves much at all, since books are stolen from it with alarming regularity. One of the worst of the security measures, thankfully ronly implemented during the peak demand times in September and January, is to bar entry to the bookstore to more than a few students at a time, which causes people to wait in long, slow lineups outside the bookstore for anywhere from 20 minutes to several hours to get their books! If you choose to wait until later in the term and the ending of the security fascism at the bookstore before getting books, though, you risk getting behind in studies. They have created a no-win situation for the students to protect their pocketbooks and their monopoly.
  Books are still stolen a great deal. For instance, this year I was one of the last 3 students to get my copy of the text for a certain mathematics course, having chosen to wait until the end of the security fascism period. I discovered that the three books that should have been remaining on the shelf were missing. I asked the guy where they were. He consulted the computer. It told him there were 3 copies of the book sitting on that very shelf. So much for all their security. Idiots. The beeper-sensor thing and cameras would be enough; and the cameras might letthem find the thieves if they weren't so preoccupied with managing all their inconvenient fascist measures that they didn't spend some time looking over the tapes (especially after discovering items missing from inventory) and watched at the door for suspicious activity (like a guy with a large bag or pack who breaks into a run as soon as they clear the exit). And it seems likely some or even most of the thefts are inside jobs, done by or with the aid of employees. Disgruntled, overworked employees, more than likely, who wish they'd hire a few more cashiers during the busy periods.