Updating Your Personal Information
Reference Article: http://newsnet.byu.edu/story.cfm/56583
It’s Tuesday, 12:49 p.m., you’re going down the sidewalk to get to your next class when all of a sudden the idea pops into your head, “Hey! I have 2 whole minutes to check my amazingly efficient Route Y Email!” So you head to the nearest computer lab, or terminal, or pop open your laptop (or you go find a friend who has a laptop. Luckily here at BYU we’re all friendly people, so any random stranger could count as a ‘friend’). Next thing you know you’re on www.byu.edu and you can hardly stand the excitement as you type in your Route Y ID & Route Y Password, knowing that soon you’ll be connected via the internet to a potential millions of friends as well as millions of offers for free laptops. You hit enter, and next thing you know, up pops something that says, “Unless you update your personal information soon, we will fine you so much that you will no longer be able to afford eating anything besides top ramen for the semester.”
Ha ha! Those silly Route Y people and BYU administrators! They are of course joking when they say that, because they know that as a student you already can’t afford to eat anything besides top ramen, and that this fine will actually make it so that you will still eat only Top Ramen, but now it will be the inferior Smack brand instead of Maruchan, and instead of eating it 3 times a day, you will only be eating it 1 time a day! So you hurry, all the while thanking your lucky stars that the BYU Route Y people went ahead and were very easy on the students, and go to update your information. “Surely this will be very easy on me,” you say to yourself, “since BYU implemented it and everything Route Y has ever done has always worked correctly on the first try,” and then you hit ‘Save Changes’ and up pops something that says, ‘We know you did your best to make this work, but our system has caused an error that will certainly be fixed in the next 15 minutes. If it is not fixed then please call 422-4000 to let them know’ So you decide to come back and try it again after class. After class, you try it once more. Still the error comes up. You decide to wait until Next Wednesday, which is of course the Wednesday one week after tomorrow, knowing that surely by then the error will no longer be occurring. You mark it on your calendar to remind yourself, resting easy in the knowledge that the deadline for updating your personal information is still several weeks away, and that you will definitely be able to change it in time.
A week goes by, the error still occurs, and this time you say to yourself, “What the heck!” and call up 422-4000 (this may or may not be the real number) and say to them, “Why isn’t it fixed?” And they say to you, “But it is fixed! It happened 5 seconds ago while you were dialing the phone!” Then you go back and try it, and the error STILL comes up! And you want to smash the computer! But of course you just sit there and you go to the phone calmly, you push the buttons calmly, and they tell you, “But we REALLY just fixed it this time! The last time we were blowing smoke, but this time we’re REALLY telling you the truth! HONEST! But remember, if you can’t update it by September 16th at 5:00 p.m. - you owe us $25.00! And also remember that we’re trying to be very easy on YOU, the STUDENTS!”
And you replace the phone calmly, and think to yourself, “Of course! They ARE being easy on me! If I can’t update my personal information, even if there is an error in the system, then I deserve to pay an extra $25.00 to BYU. They’ve been very patient with me, and if I don’t have the intelligence to figure out a way around that error in the system, then I must pay them $25.00. Sure that’s reasonable. And if somehow the error persists and I still haven’t figured out how to update my personal information by another reasonable date, like say October 4th, then surely they’ll up the fine by a factor of 5 so that I will pay them $125.00, which is very reasonable. Man oh man are they sure easy on us students.”
It’s Tuesday, 12:49 p.m., you’re going down the sidewalk to get to your next class when all of a sudden the idea pops into your head, “Hey! I have 2 whole minutes to check my amazingly efficient Route Y Email!” So you head to the nearest computer lab, or terminal, or pop open your laptop (or you go find a friend who has a laptop. Luckily here at BYU we’re all friendly people, so any random stranger could count as a ‘friend’). Next thing you know you’re on www.byu.edu and you can hardly stand the excitement as you type in your Route Y ID & Route Y Password, knowing that soon you’ll be connected via the internet to a potential millions of friends as well as millions of offers for free laptops. You hit enter, and next thing you know, up pops something that says, “Unless you update your personal information soon, we will fine you so much that you will no longer be able to afford eating anything besides top ramen for the semester.”
Ha ha! Those silly Route Y people and BYU administrators! They are of course joking when they say that, because they know that as a student you already can’t afford to eat anything besides top ramen, and that this fine will actually make it so that you will still eat only Top Ramen, but now it will be the inferior Smack brand instead of Maruchan, and instead of eating it 3 times a day, you will only be eating it 1 time a day! So you hurry, all the while thanking your lucky stars that the BYU Route Y people went ahead and were very easy on the students, and go to update your information. “Surely this will be very easy on me,” you say to yourself, “since BYU implemented it and everything Route Y has ever done has always worked correctly on the first try,” and then you hit ‘Save Changes’ and up pops something that says, ‘We know you did your best to make this work, but our system has caused an error that will certainly be fixed in the next 15 minutes. If it is not fixed then please call 422-4000 to let them know’ So you decide to come back and try it again after class. After class, you try it once more. Still the error comes up. You decide to wait until Next Wednesday, which is of course the Wednesday one week after tomorrow, knowing that surely by then the error will no longer be occurring. You mark it on your calendar to remind yourself, resting easy in the knowledge that the deadline for updating your personal information is still several weeks away, and that you will definitely be able to change it in time.
A week goes by, the error still occurs, and this time you say to yourself, “What the heck!” and call up 422-4000 (this may or may not be the real number) and say to them, “Why isn’t it fixed?” And they say to you, “But it is fixed! It happened 5 seconds ago while you were dialing the phone!” Then you go back and try it, and the error STILL comes up! And you want to smash the computer! But of course you just sit there and you go to the phone calmly, you push the buttons calmly, and they tell you, “But we REALLY just fixed it this time! The last time we were blowing smoke, but this time we’re REALLY telling you the truth! HONEST! But remember, if you can’t update it by September 16th at 5:00 p.m. - you owe us $25.00! And also remember that we’re trying to be very easy on YOU, the STUDENTS!”
And you replace the phone calmly, and think to yourself, “Of course! They ARE being easy on me! If I can’t update my personal information, even if there is an error in the system, then I deserve to pay an extra $25.00 to BYU. They’ve been very patient with me, and if I don’t have the intelligence to figure out a way around that error in the system, then I must pay them $25.00. Sure that’s reasonable. And if somehow the error persists and I still haven’t figured out how to update my personal information by another reasonable date, like say October 4th, then surely they’ll up the fine by a factor of 5 so that I will pay them $125.00, which is very reasonable. Man oh man are they sure easy on us students.”
posted by CT at 2:36 PM
11 Comments:
Route Y stinks. It should be shot. Not the person who invented it, the actual thing. Or server. Where ever it's at, it should be shot.
You should model your life after Dilbert. He's sitting on his couch talking to tech support and he says something like, "Okay, I'm checking it one more time...." (which, of course, he doesn't), and then he says "Guess what. It's STILL not working." You should do that to tech "support."
It is very well known that an entity such as Route Y is essential to the successful life tracking of BYU students. How else could BYU be successful in this endevor if policies such as these are not strictly conformed to?
PS- see BYU: It's more than just a school for reference.
Darn straight k*rok - BYU must know every detail about a students life, thus we have Route Y - I still would love to do what Traci's comment suggests however.
your main gripe seems to be with Route Y email, correct? Well, why are you using it then? You are not required to. Just use a well known other email address such as gmail, yahoo, hotmail, etc, and have your route y address forwarded to that. Not that hard...you are in college, right?
Wake Up, As to the first question, you're completely false. As for the rest of your stupidity, I refuse to dignify it with a response. Learn to comprehend what you read before you ask me another question.
Oh, and one more thing Wake Up, I think I found out where you went wrong. You see where it says 'The Rest of the Article' below the first paragraph on the main page? You just need to click on that to see the rest of the article. I'm sorry, was this your first time browsing the internet? That little set of blue words is called a 'link' and if you click on it it takes you somewhere magical. If you have any more questions about browsing the internet, please call Microsoft Tech Support: 1-800-MICROSOFT.
Wake up got pwn3d.
hello shawn,
pwn3d? what are we, some kind of script kiddie? I think you are at a university, you may want to try acting like that.
act like what? a moron? most university students act like morons. (I'm not atacking you, Shawn, just Wake up's comment).
Im just higlighting the fact that noone has agreed with you on your comment. In fact everyone thinks it's worthless, and noone likes you.
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