Ever so often, my faith gets spanked harder than a randy Japanese businessman at a bondage convention in Singapore. It's as earth shattering as Jesus un-nailing himself from the cross and doing a keg stand, the Israelis and Palestinians not blowing the living crap out of each other or the Chicago Bears actually winning a football game.
Being a staunch college elitist, I approach pre-registration without the trepidation of a more pedestrian student. I watch everyone scurry about, adopting arcane superstitions in the hope of swaying cosmic forces of mercy toward favoring their individual academic endeavors.
Of course, I have the assistance of The Barrett Honors College staff. In their quest to deliver the goods to hundreds of anxious honors students, I'm sure this intrepid group hacks schedule line numbers, bribes uncooperative professors and legions of serf-like research assistants. In a pinch, they have been known to break kneecaps.
"The ends justify the means," is their only mantra. This semester, however, even this scholastic version of the A-Team couldn't halt the unrelenting destruction of information technology gone mercilessly off course.
On Monday, like any self-respecting nerd, I checked the pre-registration results with the trouser-drenching anxiety of a terminal porno addict. I happily noted that I had gotten into an upper-level sociology class that I hadn't done any of the prerequisites for and didn't think of the matter again.
A day later, I decided that I hadn't quite perfected my schedule and wanted to change things around. ASU's interactive website told me that there was a "freeze" on drop/add due to some errors. Over the next few days, the situation gradually deteriorated, with more ominous warnings appearing on ASU Interactive.
Finally, an e-mail arrived announcing that rock bottom had been hit and the entire pre-registration process would have to be duplicated. All in all, a minor inconvenience.
Inconvenience, however, is the mortal enemy of information technology. Visualizing the registration process before the age of the computer makes quitting school and working at Circle K more attractive than Britney Spears viewed through beer goggles.
Nevertheless, the omnipresence of a huge technological understructure, constantly creating and rearranging data, leaves people in a tenuous position. It's kind of like trying to drive a NASCAR-worthy automobile at 200 mph with a blood alcohol level of .35.
The code spewing bureaucrats at the helm of ASU's digital machine clearly are slaves to the machine itself, as the recent mayhem illustrates. They sat around and waited for the entire system to self-destruct, then started over. It's like watching your laptop freeze and erase you're 20-page research paper, then simply re-writing the entire thing after you hit the reset button.
I'm not trying to bash the technical prowess of the ASU's information technology staff. We've doubtlessly culled the shrewdest programmers from the homegrown ranks and filled any gaps with third-world imports. My point is that as technology becomes more omnipresent, it also becomes more omnipotent. Once the machine assumes control of a task, human control becomes irrelevant.
Personally, I unconsciously expect technology to silently handle my business. I'm not interested in class acquisition the old-fashioned way: department stamps on carbon copy triplicates, running all over campus to unheard of buildings, bargaining with hot flash-plagued department secretaries.
This disaster will be averted and I can float through life once again on my digital raft. If I get stuck up a creek, the honors counselors will chuck me a paddle. Plus, I hear Circle K is hiring for the night shift.
Solomon Rotstein is a humanities sophomore. Reach him at Solomon.rotstein@asu.edu
