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Technology: A New Way to Give You the Runaround

Who out there hates the environment? You know you cannot stand all those plants and animals and that oxygen stuff, right? Totally annoying. It would be better if those things just did not exist, right?

Clearly, I do not actually think that way. I am a fan of recycling and, while I do not make a point of only buying organic foods, I fully support those who do. So, as a first-year student, when I heard that the college I chose was “going green by going paperless,” my first thought was, “Oh, that’s cool.” Then I (with the emotional, financial and occasionally direct support of my parents) got down to the nitty-gritty.

Have a form to fill out? It is somewhere on Foxlink. It is not on Foxlink? Oh, just keep checking back, we are still renovating some parts of the website. The form on Foxlink does not work? Oh, we will fix it eventually. Just print it out and mail it to us in the meantime. Foxlink is down? Just keep checking back! The bill is online. If you want a copy for your records, you will have to print it out yourself. No, that person is not your roommate and that is not your dorm room. See, we are doing it on the computer this year for the first time and the test assignments got posted by accident. That orientation schedule only works on Firefox or Safari. If you use Internet Explorer, you will have to call the Explorations office or download a new browser.

Fortunately, everyone I talked to about technical difficulties with the website was very pleasant and never made me feel like I was being too much of a pest. Unfortunately, none of them were really in a position to make the Rollins website, the only readily available source for all Rollins information, more user-friendly.

Have you tried using the Rollins website to find information? Trust me and save yourself a few hours. If it is there, it is either: regarding admissions, from three years ago (and information has changed), about the Hamilton Holt School, not the College of Arts and Sciences, contradictory to something on another page of the website that should have held the same information, or, a dead link.

So do I need to worry that I got that meningitis vaccination a few months over four years ago? Two out of three pages say I am good, so I guess I am good. I am not an IT person, and I am sure there are a lot of things that go into making a good website that I do not know about. I am also not a returning student, so I do not know how Rollins’ bureaucracy worked in previous years, but I feel like it had to have been better before the switch to paperless.

Like I said before, I am not opposed to the idea of Rollins going paperless, I just think that before a college goes paperless, its website needs to reach a certain standard — and Rollins rushed into it before its website got there.

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