Last night before my first night class I walked into the classroom to find all of the deans of our school, an astonishing amount of pizza and soft drinks, and a rather p.o.-ed director of the bar review course offered at our school. I only heard the tail end of the conversation between him and the deans, but apparently hardly any students had shown up for the talk he was giving about why it was beneficial to take a bar review course with him (duh). The deans were trying to assure him that next time they had one of these promotional-sign-up-fests they would plaster the campus with flyers and every law student would know about it as at the same time they tried to corral him out of the room and offer the left over pizza to the hungry students arriving for class.
Immediately following what I overheard I started to get into a conversation with a student sitting next to me and we agreed we had never even heard that this promotional thing was going on-- after all there had never been an email about it. What we agreed was that despite the many bulletin boards at the school, the actual physical mailboxes that we had, the various electronic blackboard systems offered, if you really, really, actually wanted to get our attention and have us remember something- you had to email us. What is amazing to me is how it seems as though there is a whole class of people who are working totally against this email requirement and I must say it is working to their own detriment. These are the professors that insist on not emailing you information, or the friend who refuses to check his hotmail. What's amazing to me is that they always seem this sort of deepseated hatred of email. When you say to them, "Why didn't you just email them?" they seem to act like you either just said something very vulgar or that you are suggesting that they "cheat" somehow. But the thing is, for those of us who have switched to using email as our primary mode of communication other than the telephone and in person, I doubt we will be going back much to the bulletin board system. First of all, email is automatically organized and with systems like gmail, it is also searchable and able to hold large amounts of files for a very long period of time, which are also accessible anywhere there is an internet connection. If you offer me the alternative of hanging on to a pile of brightly colored flyers that were shoved into my mailbox or taking notes on some scap of paper I am almost certain to lose or forget off of a bulletin board as opposed to simply reading and email, marking it with a "star" and searching for it later...I am choosing the email.
What is also amazing to me is that these people who are so against email seem to be missing the point that this ALSO makes it easier for them. Instead of printing up a thousand brightly colored flyers, stuffing them into mailboxes, tacking them up around campus, and emblazoning them on buttons saying things like, "Amnesty International Meeting! This Wednesday!"-- all they have to do is spend approximately three minutes emailing me. Thus the only conclusion I have is that in fact, these people LOVE making those stupid flyers and what they are really upset about is the demise of the flyer-making way of life. I for one am not mourning its death. If you need to get in touch with me- shoot me an email.
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