2003-09-09 - 9:15 a.m.

Mechanical things, in general, do not work.

We have a stove in which the range and oven fluctuate wildly between random temperatures. Our freezer sometimes forgets to freeze. Our "low flow" toilet sometimes requires more flushes, and therefore more water, than a "normal" toilet.

The bus sometimes refuses to stop for people at the bus stop, but this is not so much a mechanical problem as a stupidity problem. However, about 30% of the time, the "stop request" bell on the bus will be broken, and about 15% of the time the marquee that tells riders which bus it is will be broken. Buses never adhere to the bus schedule. The subway ominously jerks from side to side and rarely has adequate ventilation.

Simmons College has built a new classroom/office building. The classrooms are equipped with computer/vcr/projector dealies that never work the first time around and require advanced tinkering by various professors, students, student media workers, and media techs. It is impossible to show movies on the projector, because the screen is directly next to the window, and light streams in. The air conditioning doesn't work properly. The desks are unfit for sitting at for more than five minutes.

A friend of mine and I were unable to log into the new high-tech job system, the only place on-campus jobs are listed, because we were "not in the firewall." I'm sure that's not the correct usage of "firewall". I don't know why the techs who programmed this system named their database with a name that is already in use. It took about an hour to enter our names and student ID numbers.

Amazingly, my $10 portable CD player works great, to the point where I can take out one of the batteries and it still runs.