Trent's poor computers...

Be warned, this is primarily a frustrated rant.

This morning an assignment was due in one of my classes. It is worth 20% of my mark, although the course is only a half-course, so it's nothing huge. However, it was supposed to be over 4000 words long. That, along with its being a science course, made it a particularly arduous assignment. It was long, boring and not worth as much as the time put into it.

In my typical fashion it wasn't completed until fairly late the night before, which is OK with me. I am a little lazy and haven't bought new ink for my printer in ages and I instead use the printers at Trent to print off the assignments beforehand. It's a little annoying, but it always works. This morning, however, it didn't.

I took the early bus to give myself some leeway before class, especially since the computers have a tendency to take a little while to load up. I had roughly 30 minutes before class. You would think this would be well enough time to turn on a computer and print a paper off.

The computers at Trent are notorious for taking long to boot up, but the mornings are especially bad because the computers have been shut down all night. I'm guessing (I'm not a computer whiz) that as the computers are used throughout the day, they seem to 'warm up', like a car, and take a much shorter time to load up later in the day.

The computer finally loaded up with ten minutes left for class. Waiting for twenty minutes to have a computer load up is painful, especially in this day and age. I finalized some of the files and sent them to the printer, although the second file froze as it was loading (I imagine the computer was still feeling a tad slow at that point).

I then received an error message telling me that the print job didn't work. As I discovered a few minutes later, the printer wasn't connected to my computer somehow and the printer itself required maintenance. Several other students in the computer lab were in the same situation and equally (if not more) displeased. One student kicked a few chairs around. I don't blame him.

At this point class was starting, so I elected to run across the bridge to the other side of the campus to print off the paper in the library. It didn't take quite as long to load this time and I finally got into class ten minutes late.

I do take some of the fault for this silly situation, but it really shows how awful Trent's computer system is. Forty minutes to print something? It's a little reminiscent of print times circa 1982.

Trent has a lot of things going for it, but computers is not one of them.