Thankful for ITR students on campus

I have been living on Cabrini’s campus for three years now and one of the most aggravating processes that I have come across when I move in each year is getting my laptop hooked up to the Internet, actually, Cabrini College’s extensive and annoying process of simply hooking up a small, green cable into a network jack.

I came here freshman year with a Dell laptop. It took about 35 to 40 minutes for me to see a screen, “You have successfully registered your jack. Restart your computer after five minutes…..” Blah, blah, blah, I’m sure you know the rest.

Now, I came here this past August with a Gateway laptop. I thought I may have chosen a lucky winner of a cord this time, but again, my luck ran short. Instead of sitting in my desk chair and getting frustrated, I marched right on over to the ITR classroom and got right down to the point. I wanted the workers to help me now because of having such a rigorous schedule and work load, I needed my computer to be up and running as soon as possible. Instead of getting my “comp” registered, the worker wrote me out a list of steps to take to get me in the right direction. So, off to West Res I went, wishing for the best even though these steps looked to be written in gibberish.

Even though I had an open mind about the situation, my screen read, “You failed.” Disgusted, I called the help desk and set up an appointment with workers again the next day.

That day, I was “up and at ‘em,” loaded my laptop in my bag and headed back to the dreadful place. The man told me I needed to get rid of one of my antivirus systems and download Cabrini’s. He was nice enough to do that for me and told me to plug that sucker of a cord back into my computer and start again.

Let’s continue. I woke up, ran to my computer, picked up my phone, called the support staff and now got a messaging service. I left my name, number and problem. This same, exact routine went on every day for an entire seven school days, with not one, and I mean one, call back.

It just so happened that I ended up taking the rest of the semester off just days after this and I was actually happy to a point because I was going to be able to use my brand-new laptop without being hooked-up to a crazy system here at Cabrini.

So, it was time for a fresh spring semester and I was ready to start anew. Or so I thought.

Gosh, I still couldn’t get my laptop set-up and those people in the ITR room must have thought I was stupid with all of my questions, but I looked at them in the same light. They were supposed to know how to handle these things and their knowledge proved nothing to me. The tones some of these people had with me were terrible: “I don’t know who told you to do that.” It was you people, no one else.

I lost my urge to care anymore and decided to use my roommate’s computer and the library computers to get me through the semester. I’m sorry, it was just bullshit and I felt like a geek because I actually memorized my jack number.

Then one day the clouds cleared and the sun decided to shine on me. I met Joe Johnson in one of my classes and found out he worked for ITR. Maybe I could get through to this man. I straight up asked him, “Joe, will you please help me out with this problem?” He gratefully gave me his phone number, told me to call him when I WAS available and that he would come to MY room and help. Oh my God, this was not happening.

That night, I walked back to my dorm, called Joe, he came to my room and he said he would do his best. I literally sat on my futon for five minutes, then he turned around and said, “Ok, you are all set.”

I think I peed my pants when I heard those words. I thanked him maybe five times in one minute. He walked out of my door and low and behold, my computer screen smiled back at me.

Thank God that ITR employs students here. If they hadn’t have used their heads in that department I would still be walking back from the library at midnight each night.