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Copyright 2002
The Student Life
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Worker Claims ITS Service "Good"
Dear
Editor,
Recent editorials paint ITS’ track record bleakly.
Users have been “dissatisfied with ITS’s performance
for several years.” We throw away “thousands
of dollars worth of working computer parts every year.”
We even reduced a student to “tears day after day
as [she] could not contact [her] professors, co-workers,
or classmates and friends.”
We, at least, are students proud of ITS’ performance
(though the collective 10+ years we’ve spent behind
the helpdesk is a slight bias). For the record, ITS donates
computer parts to charity, generating tax write-offs for
our budget. Students have a right to feel angry and frustrated
over the password issue: we unintentionally screwed up
and are deeply sorry.
Here’s what ITS does right. We’re available
in person or over the phone (x18062) to answer your questions
until midnight Sunday through Thursday and 5 PM Fridays
and Saturdays. We offer room service daily to fix dorm-room
problems we can’t troubleshoot over the phone. We
can immediately evaluate laptop problems from 6PM to midnight
Sunday through Thursday. We promise to do our best to
help you with any computer problem.
Our students regularly work over their hours, be it finishing
a problem in a dorm room or helping a fellow classmate
print out an assignment in the wee hours. Over 1,400 students
reside at Pomona and most own computers, yet at press
time we had only 10 with problems waiting to be fixed.
They were all called again last night.
ITS doesn’t simply wait to respond to the latest
problem. We are currently planning online class registration,
Webmail software upgrades, and a Student web portal filled
with neat bells and whistles. (Work on the Alumni/Staff
web portal produced the password scrambling. Even student
consultants had to have their passwords changed before
we could help out).
We’re always working to improve communication. We
now have a contingency plan to use mailbox alerts when
email goes down and maintain two blog pages for quick
updates on campus wide problems. While Verizon—our
internet provider—will still inconvenience the Claremont
Colleges with outages, the phone company will still cut
through bundles of network cable, and virus infections
will still pop up on the network, at least you’ll
know about it and we’ll help you as best we can.
In essence, we are just students helping other students
out.
Kevin Hettrich ’04
On behalf of the ITS Supervisor team
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