Louis Ryan
Staff Writer
With a ‘step-by-step’ connection guide so achingly extensive that it would comfortably exceed the word-limit of this article, TCDconnect is surely the most shockingly onerous network service vehicle ever proffered to a student body, anywhere. Part-booklet, part-virtual manual, the TCDconnect service outlines more than a dozen individual steps which, if followed attentively, will furnish the diligent seeker with “fast, secure internet access”, so that they may enjoy glorious virtual boons on the TCD campus.
With regard to Irish Universities at large however, it should be noted that this torturous “Fort Knox” style of authentication practice is unusual to say the least. UCD striplings, for example, need only supply a college username and password, and bob’s-your-uncle they’re away and connected to their student network. Indeed one such stripling, upon reading the lengthy online portion of the “TCDconnect guide for students” that I showed him, was heard to remark “surely, a joke?” as he shook his head in disbelief, and continued to enjoy his unrestricted McDonalds Wifi.
A probing of the mass outpouring of grief that surrounds this network, along with a few other little gibes at IS Services, now follows.
Some time, take a spell to go and find the TCDconnect network clinic (199 Pearse St.—take the humble, bunker-like side entrance with the green door). Here you can sit, gaze, and marvel at the hordes of nervous, sometimes tearful, Trinity students waiting like addled drug addicts for a cyber-fix from the I.S. pros. Overwhelmed by the labyrinthine task of connecting to the network, these poor, exhausted souls have had to “book in” to one of the four network clinics (also known as “troubleshooting clinics”) that take place in 199 Pearse St. every week. For many this is not their first time, nor their last.
I spoke to one of them. We stepped outside the clinic. I extended a magnanimous hand. Here’s a tasty gob from the interview with this troubled female adolescent that followed. Sadly she refused to be indentified for the purposes of the interview:
“Who are you?” I asked punchily.
“Remember; I can’t tell you” she replied, calmly.
“Ok” I conceded. “What brings you here?” I quizzed her.
“I think my Anti-Virus software must be out of date or something, because I can’t get connected to the Trinity network at the moment. I’m here to get it sorted, but it takes so long! First you have to book it around your schedule, and then when you get here there’s only two staff working here!”
“First timer?”
“I wish!” she chuckled noiselessly. “No, I had to go through the same rigmarole as everyone else in getting connected to the network in the first place, but in fairness the network clinics have come a long way since then, the queues used to be a lot worse. Still though, I just don’t see why it should be so difficult to connect in the first place! It’s just Wifi, but they’ve made it so complicated that it seems that half the students trying to connect have to come to this clinic before they get on, and that’s just wasting everybody’s time.”
Whispering, I provokingly asked her what words she would use to describe this TCDconnect network service, and suddenly her brow furrowed and she rapidly spat out the words “atrocious, dire, shoddy” with astonishing vitriol.
“Anything else to add?”
“No, that’s just about everything.”
Just as she thought she was free to leave, however, I hit her with it. “What about the rumours?”
She looked baffled. “What rumours?!”
It is no great secret, and lies beyond the scope of this article, that rumours of ink-fanged, over-sized ‘Comp Doctors of Death’ repeatedly subjecting defenseless Junior Freshman students to hideous, unspeakable cyber-rituals have been spreading across college like wildfire over the last few months. I posited it to her.
“That’s ridiculous,” she says, “the people that I’ve come in contact with have been kind, helpful and of a distinctly average size. ‘Comp doctors of death’ is certainly not a term I would use.”
‘Comp Doctors of death’ or no, this anonymous female adolescent’s complaint of TCDconnect torment is hardly an isolated incident. Indeed in a survey among Trinity Students undertaken by I.S. Services pertaining to the TCDconnect service, 65.8% of the 820 students surveyed found it either “moderately difficult” or “very difficult” to register to the network, while a threadbare 6.7% found it “very easy” to register. And despite the recent I.S. services initiative of online booking for the Death Camps (I should say network clinics), of the 349 students surveyed for “How did you register to attend a TCDconnect service troubleshooting clinic?” a whopping 70% said that they had done so “via the helpdesk walk-in service”, while only 30% said they had done so “via the online TCDconnect booking service.” Let us now examine about the miserable fate of the whopping 70%.
18 minutes. Let me repeat that once more for emphasis. 18 minutes. According to the IS Services “Key Performance Indicators”, that was the average queuing time for the I.S. services “helpdesk-walk in service” in the month of January 2012. That’s a LONG time. Factor this into the shambolic, puzzlingly irregular opening hours (mon, wed, fri 10am-1pm; tues, thurs, 2-5pm), and you get risibly low averages: 10 people seen per day, 40 people seen per week, many of whom are redirected to one of those god-awful “troubleshooting clinics” in any case.
But what is there to do to pass the time while you wait 18 minutes? Amusements are, admittedly, few and far between. Two friendly vending machines are worth a look, as is the white Is Services screen displaying sapless, inoffensive bulletins, while light banter with the ever-present Áras an Phiarsaigh security personnel can make 5 of the minutes seem like 4. On the whole, however, it is an extraordinarily dull affair, and queuers with a growling stomach should be warned that the modest canteen is best described as a poor relation to the two vending machines; a packed lunch is advisable.
So what lies in store for the next generation of Trinity youngsters thirsty for effortless network connection? With the hacking abilities of a certain Junior Freshman student grabbing international news headlines last week (mug-shot and all!), one can only speculate that a sadistic IS Services cyber-tome, packed full of cryptic, void TCDconnect steps, is to follow.
