The Bell Memorial Union on Chico State’s campus features a basement computer lab for students – computers with a lot of issues.

I had run down to the lab to do a quick and final glance of an assignment before printing it out and running to class. That didn’t turn out quite the way I’d planned.

I woke the computer up and waited to get to a login screen. I entered my student user name and password.

“ERROR! Cannot complete request.”

Wait, what?

Oh. The program used to log students in is still connecting. One minute. Two minutes. Three minutes.

Ha! I logged in.

It took another two to three minutes for my flash drive to be recognized by the system. Well, alright, it can take that long on a system it hadn’t been plugged into before.

Open the drive, open the folder and double click on the Word file.

One minute. Two minutes. Three minutes. Four minutes.

CNLT-ALT-DELETE! Well the system process is running… six minutes.

There’s Word!

Read, read, fix punctuation error, read, fix word choice, read and done!

CNLT-P! Connecting to printer: one minute…

I now see why the campus supported ITSS labs (MLIB 116 and 450 and THMA 131) can be so popular. It doesn’t take 15 minutes to open, skim and print a document.

I know that lab is on the Associated Students’ radar but those poor things need a serious check-up – for the benefit of the students who’s fees are paying for them.

Joseph Rogers can be reached at [email protected] or @JosephLRogers1 on Twitter.