This is in response to the article in last week's paper about ITS and its customer service survey about the work they did on my "super senior" account last week.

I have no complaints about my service at ITS - once I made a complaint. My problems were handled promptly and courteously, the staff person was knowledgeable and I have had no problems since then on my email.

However, I am absolutely furious with ITS and the unprofessional and irresponsible manner in which it has handled its recent administrative errors. It is absolutely ludicrous that there is no apparent contingency plan for communicating with students when email goes down. Never, ever in my five years at Pomona has email ever been offline for more than an few hours. Four or five days is an absolute nightmare at a top level university like Pomona. As an off-campus student, I was in tears day after day as I could not contact my professors, my co-workers, or my classmates and friends. I couldn't communicate with my family, I couldn't plan events that were my responsibility, I couldn't send schoolwork to professors. There was no "word of mouth" to tell me how easy it was to fix the problem, because I don't live in a dorm. I am truly shocked that it took four days for me to even learn what the problem was.

There are multiple ways to communicate with students, such as posting flyers, sending a message through the phone system, etc. Apparently, ITS not only has no plan for this type of situation, it refused to implement any sort of communication once the problem it had caused occurred (other than to send out an email message via the digester).

I was also shocked to learn that my account had been terminated, because I was a so-called "super senior," when all the other '03 accounts were cut off. I only learned about this when I went in, finally, to change my password - there had been no notification in advance. I am used to being treated like an anomaly because I am a fifth-year student, but never like I was less important than other students. I know that there are at least a dozen of us "super seniors" who still very much need the school email, and I can't believe ITS did not find a way put our names into the system and keep our email working. Nor were they proactive enough to fix the problem once they realized our accounts would be terminated. I feel like there was a real lack of respect for our needs as fifth and sixth year students from ITS. The staff person who helped fix my email me told me "there might be a problem" when he saw my email had a 1999 in it, which means that obviously ITS knew about the problems with their email system and did nothing to rectify it.

I am truly appalled by the level of non-service and unprofessionalism from ITS. We deserve better at a school like Pomona. I would be happy with an explanation, or just an apology, but ITS must be responsible for its mistakes.

Thank you,

Abby Machson-Carter
Class of December, '03