The BoneBlog

Dear Genius IT Department of St. Louis Community College:

Though I sometimes question my decision, I am one of your students.  I know you think you are doing us a favor by providing us with college e-mail addresses (though you are at least one decade --that's 10 years, look it up if you need to -- behind most other educational institutions in doing so).  I know you think that giving us a hip Windows Live e-mail address is going to make us turn cartwheels across campus and all that rot.  I know this sweet revolution comes at the same time as your hot-dog web redesign that made your website look slick  but also took one-click tasks and turned them into three clicks.  Models of efficiency, you are.

I hate to burst your bubble, but some of us, Genius IT Department, already have e-mail addresses.  Some of us have a real fondness for our current addresses because --among other reasons -- they are easy for people to remember.  Some of us like our current addresses so much, in fact, that we don't want your e-mail addresses and are in fact offended at the '2' after our name in your addresses, just on principle.  Some of us entered our current e-mail addresses in your electronic system as our default addresses because (I know this will come as a surprise to you) that is where we want our correspondence to go when our professors utilize the electronic communications distribution features at STLCC.  And some of us really detest that the domain is 'my.stlcc.edu.'

Still, if you want to waste your time and energy providing us with e-mail addresses even though we don't want or need one, that's cool.  Whatever it takes for you to get those 8 hours a day.

But.

When you decide to make the use of these STLCC-imposed e-mail addresses mandatory, you cross the line.  When -- without any notification whatsoever to your students -- you change our default addresses to these STLCC-imposed e-mail addresses, our unknowing professors send out important e-mails, and students do not receive them because they did not know you chuckleheads had chimped out and changed our default e-mail addresses, you cross the line.  When you make us log into one system to find out what our addresses are, then jump through hoops to log into another system, you cross the line.

In fact, the only reason it occurred to me that you may have lost your marbles and done this is because one professor told us she heard these addresses just might become mandatory in July or August of this year. 

While I like some surprises, I assure you this is not one of those.  You are provoking the hornets.

Love,

Michelle

Hey Michelle. I'm a little peeved by the email addresses as well. It will be my first year at St. Louis Community College this Fall, and already I can't figure out how to log in to that email. I like the concept, but like you said, the domain name is off, and I'm surprised that Windows Live accepts "my.stlcc.edu". It always says "invalid username", so I don't know what's going on there.

Also, I have a 3 after my name, so that's annoying. Haha.

Thanks for posting this and letting me know that someone else feels the same way I do.