Stine and why I hate my uni.

Stine is our shiny new system that's supposed to deal with the applications for our courses. E-Learning and all that. The problem with my university and E-Learning is that most of the staff think the photocopier is the most modern invention they can accommodate, so you can imagine how well this kind of thing has been received so far. It does not work and causes havoc, apart from a few faculties, most of the uni just aren't ready for this kind of thing. I hate Stine.

Why?

They sent me a password that does not work. 

IT DOES NOT WORK. 

At all. Not possible to log in, even though it should be, according to the material they sent me, from "October 2006".

Which means that either the user name (which for reasons best known to my uni is not simply my matric number but some... code thingy) is wrong or the password (which some idiot decided to type out in Arial, anyway, which means that it's anyone's guess what this "I" is. i? L? Who knows? It's pretty much up to me. I'm only hoping that the "0" thing is indeed a "0" and not a slim "O". Nah, it's a "0". Other than that... I had about 10 goes at it. Without result.) I sent a mail to what I can only hope is the right address, because of course there is no kind of support other than the slightly better informed IT students standing around on Campus who I will pester tomorrow. I already feel sorry for them.

I hate my university. 

Stine II

Hm, so after trying to log into the Stine thing those ten times with all kinds of variations, without ever succeeding, I not only sent an E-Mail to the supposed support address, but also called the info service this morning.

Which made me be late for my Latin class. Hm. Whatever.
On the phone was a young, vaguely panicky-sounding man who told me that he would not be able to do anything, either, but he'd take down my complaint and have a look at my account, but he couldn't promise anything. Actually, I tried to get him to log into my account, but he wouldn't for security reasons. Not that he would have been able to do anything with the password, anyway.

So, he promised me to do what he could, in sheer frustration I tried to log in again, and - lo and behold!

In I got.

It's creepy. Either me AND my girl, who both tried to log into the account, using all possible variations of the password (both of them, one with "i" and one with "l"), are too dumb to actually get it right - which would be likely if only I had tried it and only had tried it once or twice - or those guys are a lot more competent than they let on. Hmmm... Either way, Stine freaks me out.

And I feel like a complete idiot for calling them again and telling them in my "I-know-this-makes-me-sound-like-an-imbecile"-voice that it's suddenly working and sorry about wasting their time.

Gosh, I hate computers.