Friday, August 21, 2009

Telephone Rant: Or, Ma Bell, Where Art Thou?

This isn't exclusively a college issue. But college students seem to be on the cutting edge of the matter. So here's the rant:
Students don't really want professors or parents or counselors on Facebook, right? That's cool. Or on MySpace, either. That's fine, too. And it seems that email messages from school-related sources get largely ignored, if they even get opened. (Not so cool, but okay.)
But what's worse is that if you call college students on the phone number they provided at the time of enrollment, you'll get one of three annoying results:
1) The number has been disconnected or is no longer in use.
2) There is an answering machine (good, so far), but the message is so quirky or cutesy that it is impossible to tell if any message left on this machine will ever reach the student in question. (Many a message has been left for Connie Co-ed or Frankie Freshman on an answering machine located in a place that neither Connie nor Frankie have ever set foot!)
Or 3) a sibling or cognitively-impaired visitor from another planet--someone, in brief, who has never heard of the student or of the university and who can't find a writing utensil to save the life of a child--answers the phone and, despite great efforts on the caller's part to comm-un-i-cate s l o w l y and clearly, really has no intention of or capacity for delivering any part of the important message to the aforementioned student. (Really, putting a message in a bottle and tossing it upstream in the Manitowoc River is about as likely to get there.)
As a result of any of these three things, Connie doesn't find out that she didn't sign a necessary paper for financial aid or Frankie doesn't respond to the offer for a newly vacated spot in the class he's dying to get into.

Mail? You say, mail? Don't get me started!

So the BLURB's advice for anyone, but especially college students, who want to get their messages: Give the school the number of a phone you are likely to answer. College officials will not crowd your digital space by texting or twitting or tweeting or gurging you anytime soon, if you will just answer your phone once in a while and, Mon Dieu, maybe even read their good old-fashioned email messages, too.