All I want to do is print …

The return from break has brought a few changes to the everyday campus scene … unfortunately, the downfall of Sodexho was not one of them. On the brighter side of things, the new Information Commons, the long-awaited modernization of the Pods, seems to have brought a lot of good. I have just one suggestion.

While I really do like the new set-up a lot more, and I swear I’m not out to really rip on it, I think we need to make just a few more improvements before it’s truly the supreme paradise of all research/computer lab facilities. Fortunately for the feasibility of my suggestions, most of them involve nothing more than a little effort on each of our parts.

Before I move into the realm of public etiquette, I just want to make one point to whoever is in charge of the management of the Information Commons (even though I’m going to keep calling it the Pods from now on, because come on, moving it a few yards doesn’t mean it’s all that different).

Every single time I go into the new Pods to print something (because really, that’s all I go there for), every single computer is taken. It’s especially bad during peak daytime hours. My suggestion is really quite simple. Make at least one computer in there like an express lane at the grocery store. Put it somewhere easily accessible, or near one of the printers, and put some sort of sign on it that says “For Printing ONLY.” Seriously, this is quite possibly the easiest thing you could do to make a lot of people happy. If that one computer has some sort of five minute time limit or something, I think we’d be set. People who want to print just cruise in, access their email or whatever, and send it to a printer. The end. Crisis averted.

That’s my only problem with the actual set-up.

As for public computer lab etiquette, there is one major thing that bothers me. I know the Pods have never operated under a silent study kind of rule, but just because we aren’t packed into traditional rows like sardines, it doesn’t mean you need to talk louder. So stop it.

Molly Ariotti is a freshman political science and geography major that really wishes that the Pods would just give her free printer cartridges.