Incompetence to blame for technology problems

April 7, 2008 —

As you might have read in the last issue of the Vanguard, SVSU's technology woes are far from over. The same problems that continue to creep up year after year are showing no signs of relenting. I still have no idea if these concerns are reaching third-floor Wickes - the place where problems like these should be discussed, worked on, and solved. I'm starting to wonder if when a system goes down on campus, it's become so common that it's not treated with importance. There's no reason to believe otherwise. Incompetence.

Wireless is up. Finally. I had an argument with a student-worker in the wireless office around five weeks ago. That was fun. He was about as useful as the Facebook-surfing Zahnow library workers. Through the tangled mess that is the SVSU Web site, I managed to find the pages of instruction for registering my notebook for wireless access at SVSU. Even though the site said I could set everything up from off-campus, it was wrong. I tried explaining this and it didn't get far. I had to take my computer to the wireless office and have them set it up for me, and even after that, it wouldn't work. The left arm doesn't know what the right arm is doing. More incompetence.

I lost a paper last week. I saved it one the M: drive. Big mistake. Usually, I will save my papers on the desktop of whichever computer I'm on, but for some reason, I chose the M: drive. Midway through, I received an error message, erasing any unsaved progress as well as restricting my access to the entire drive. It's almost to the point where you don't get mad anymore,it's just what you expect. It's very frustrating when you have to rewrite something you just spent so much time writing, and the paper was late. Rampant incompetence.

The technological problems don't stop there, folks. As you might have already noticed, the Vanguard's Web site was down for almost three weeks. It was down because it depends on University technology. The site is hosted on the svsu.edu domain. Everyone who wrote articles that were published online (myself included) didn't reach any readers. This is a problem. With a lackluster Web site as it is (we're working on that), any down time is increasingly hurtful to the Vanguard's online reputation. How many online readers did we lose for good because of the "outage"?

Finally, to top everything off, I can't use the wireless capabilities on my iPhone on campus. I've already written a column devoted specifically to the iPhone issue, and I received many encouraging e-mail responses because of it, however the problem still looms. SVSU's position is that it's up to Apple to implement the necessary securities the University requires. At the same time, one of my friends can log on to a secure wireless network at Delta College with his iPhone. Congratulations SVSU, you've been passed in technological advancement by Delta. How many more new technologies are we going to ignore? Blatant incompetence.

If you're reading this in your third-floor Wickes office; e-mail me. Tell me why this is going on. Tell me as a student, tell me as a tax-payer, please, tell me. I just hope it's something big, something justifiable. I hope I don't hear that there's nothing that can be done, or that the problem is being solved, or that it would take too much money. I'll be shocked if I hear anything at all. Is it really too much to ask for a storage drive that doesn't crash, e-mail that isn't always down, a Web site that isn't refreshed for weeks, dependable wireless access, and at least the technological capabilities of Delta College? Apparently so.