Now that the excitement is largely over, I reflected today on the other fun side of undergraduate admissions: dealing with parents doing the work of their children. Sometimes these parents are call on a student’s behalf because they mistakenly assume our phone lines shut down before their kids get home from school (we’re open late). Quite often, however, they’re just carrying Junior on their back, and they’re usually jerks about it, too.

We get yelled at, cajoled, whined to, yelled at, hectored, and lectured. They demand access to their child’s computing account, even after we inform them that federal law prohibits it. Hear me, O helicopter parents: it doesn’t matter that you write the checks! You are now dealing with The Man, not your local high school. Do you really think university staffers are going to risk losing their jobs just because your kid can’t be bothered to pick up the phone?

It’s not uncommon for a parent to call in and, upon being told that we can only discuss account information with the student, say “oh, well they’re right here, let me put them on the phone”. I mean, what? Hello? Your kid was right there all along and you’re still doing the work? Were they not able to talk on the phone because they were nursing at your teat? We want to help, and we will help, but we have to help them, not you. This is no longer about you. This is their onramp to the Big Scary Road of adulthood; let them drive for once. You’re not doing them any favors.

It looks like whoever created the spambot known as adol77dai51 is at it again; a new out-of-the-blue, non-posting user account “alina77vere9uk” just got created today, with an email address of alina77vere@gmail.com.

A Google search of the name currently returns only 9 results, but they are just as disparate as their predecessor, appearing on English-, Chinese-, and Spanish-language sites. The naming convention is undeniably similar. While I am pressed to find any significant number of posts from the previous iteration, it seems clear someone is going to throw the switch one day and a whole lot of WordPress blogs are going to sink under the weight of spam posts from “registered users”.

Do yourself a favor and delete this “user” if it shows up on your own WordPress blog, just to be on the safe side.

It’s undergraduate admissions time once again, that merry season when everybody pitches in to deal with the flood of calls and e-mail from clueless applicants, confused transfer students, and enraged helicopter parents, all trying to access the admissions system to find out whether or not they (or their offspring) were accepted. It’s always a magical time of year.

We seriously wonder sometimes how some of these folks managed to make it past grade school, much less have a shot at attending a university. If only the admissions office would empower us to summarily reject some of these dolts. We’d all be better off.

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On Monday I sent an e-mail message to someone who’s organizing an event I’m involved in. I didn’t hear back from the person that day. Tuesday day passed without a response as well, but I wasn’t particularly worried, because I knew I’d be seeing that person face-to-face in the evening.

When I got to the meeting place at 7:30 p.m., I met up with my correspondent, who told me “oh, I sent you an e-mail reply”, and went off to attend to other business. This didn’t faze me, since I hadn’t checked my mail since 4:00 that afternoon, and I’d sent them some questions about supply needs. I figured they’d sent me detailed answers and didn’t feel like rehashing it in person. No problem.

When I got home and checked my mail, I was confounded. They’d responded by saying they received my mail, but didn’t see the message. That’s it. Interestingly, the entire text of my original message was attached to their response. Initially peeved because I was made to look like an idiot for their mail client’s flub, it dawned on me that instead of saying “oh, yeah, I got what you sent but couldn’t read it”, from which point we could have exchanged the information both of us need, they instead referred me to a reply that took me back to square one, which was deeply irritating. And it took two days to get there.

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When I was first interviewing for this job, the Director of the campus data center described the campus environment as “bucolic”, given its fair amount of greenspace, trees, and impressive squirrel population. Lately the office has more than lived up to this adjective, as a small flock of guinea fowl and a single peahen have taken up residence on the lawn in front of our building.

I find it pretty cool; I like having them around. In other news, most of my colleagues have been talking about a barbecue to celebrate the beginning of spring. I’m sure it’s just coincidence.

Though there are still months left to come up with some stupid, arrogant topper, it seems fitting that President Bush has chosen to veto a bill banning waterboarding as one of the last major policy decisions of his incompetent, malicious career.

Fitting, because Bush has been torturing this country (and several choice foreign locations) throughout his tenure. Halliburton, New Orleans, flagrant abuse of signing statements, secrecy, an asinine energy policy, illegal surveillance, the bungled occupation of Iraq—need I go on? This latest bit of shame to be pinched out of his soiled Oval Office seems merely the cherry on top: an official statement that we are no better than our enemies.
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