Gripes for a new year
By Nicholas Weiss
It is the beginning of a new school year and I am encouraged to look back on my first two years at Santa Clara in reflection, so that I might be able to look forward to my next two with more hope.Ã
I have thoroughly enjoyed my time at this institution, so I would like to make it clear that I mean no ill will; but as any honest lover would say, you can always use work. Ã
I hope that by the time I leave here we will have adopted a sophisticated enough spam filtering system so that I will no longer receive a message notifying me of every time potential junk mail was "blocked." Ã It is not, in fact, blocked if I am sent a message that contains the "blocked" message within it. Our current spam filter should more appropriately be called a spam re-packager.
I hope that by the time I leave here the desk receptionists won't ask me for my ID when I'm the only one around. The doors are unlocked with only the swiping of an ID, there is nobody walking in with me and it would be impossible for me to have gotten in without an ID. Go back to getting paid to play tanks.
Our school, like Hogwarts, is one of the safest places around because of these desk jockeys and the campus safety, so we should not get rid of them. Every aspect of a school is in the service industry and when our safety precautions show more restrictions than they do service, something has gone wrong.
I hope that just once in my life the post office will be open when I attempt to go there.Ã It's like they hate working with students, not that I blame them, so they plan to have business hours during classes, take lunch breaks whenever classes are out and be closed when people are the most free (weekends and holidays).
Finally, I hope that by the time I leave here the bookstore will have competitive pricing instead of blatantly ripping us off.
Santa Clara creates a virtual monopoly by disallowing cars for freshmen and somehow convincing all office supply and bookstores to stay away.Ã Four dollars for a spiral notebook?Ã Really?
A word of advice: until they do fix this ludicrous price gouging, go to half.com or amazon.com.Ã
And while I am on the subject of the bookstore, I hope that more of my teachers will realize that I do not have infinite financial means and that they just can't carpet bomb the book section. Put the books on the syllabus that we will actually use and leave Oprah's Book Club out of this.
Nicholas Weiss is a junior psychology and philosophy double major.