Without wireless, productivity prevails at vp

 

Dear AirPennNet,

I can’t go on without you.

It’s Sunday, so it’s time to do my work. But without you here to help me procrastinate, I actually have to do it now.

I can’t read the blogs bashing Sarah Palin, I can’t check my friends’ uploaded photo albums and I can’t see what the 10-day weather forecast is for Philadelphia, so I don’t know if and when I need my umbrella…

* * * 

As soon as I realized that AirPennNet wasn’t working for anyone in Van Pelt, I expected riots, bidding wars on Ethernet cords and endless lines behind the computer stations that had the coveted connection. Perhaps the South Park episode where the Internet disappears lowered my expectations of humanity to a far greater degree than reality, for today I witnessed a natural calm where I foresaw disaster.

During this unacceptable wireless calamity I saw far more people reading books and highlighting notes, their laptops folded in resignation on the desks before them, than rioting. It was as if the whole community of students became intellectually re-awakened without the distractions of the World Wide Web.

Jenny Vanyur, a first year graduate student at Penn’s School of Social Policy and Practice, was annoyed with the wireless failure. In order to complete her assignment she “had to print out pages I normally would have just viewed on the Internet,” she said. “Otherwise, it kept me from taking [Internet] study breaks.”

Daniel Michaeli, a college senior, also felt less distracted without wireless access. Michaeli is a member of the Student Technology Advisory Board and expects the new system to work flawlessly within the next two weeks. “The system will be great once the kinks are worked out,” he said.

* * *

… AirPennNet, even though your presence on campus was very much missed today, it seems to have brought about whole new level of student productivity. Please, for the sake of normalcy, work out your “kinks” ASAP so that we can get back to our usual procrastination methodology. Otherwise, things might get crazy around here and… I don’t know, people may start to read the books in the library or something.

Get well soon,

Rachel

This entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 6:00 am and is filed under Penn, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.