Captain Irony has decided to spread his purview to matters outside of his own creation. This just in:
In Washington State, one of the departments at the University of Washington–in order to save money–has had all its phones removed. You can now only reach the professors through e-mail (or by stopping by.) You can no longer call them.
Which department? Glad you asked.
The communications department.
PAD
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WALKING? You mean college students actually walk to places like classrooms and professor’s offices? Go figure… I thought at this point that all the classes would be online or broadcast. Will wonders never cease? 🙂
Oh, and as for removing the phones – realistically, wouldn’t we suspect that every single professor has a cell phone, which he probably prefers to use instead of an office phone?
It’s not just communications… now it’s technology and communications. Woot!
I remain,
Sincerely,
Eric L. Sofer
The Silver Age Fogey
x<]:o){
This is a joke, right? If not, they’ll be in great shape the first time someone needs to call 911 and then… oh wait, no phones!
911 from cell phones isn’t so hot. If you’re not coherent enough to give them your location, they can’t find you, unlike land lines.
So… a joke, right?
Amy – almost all cellphones have GPS identification built into them nowadays so that you can call 911 and you can be located – whether or not you are conscious enough to tell the police where you are.
Perhaps that is so, but there are times I have dialed 911 on my cell phone and had it ring forever without anyone picking it up. Things turned out okay, but I remember thinking “Great. Just Great. If some psycho was beating down my door right now and I was dialling 911 I’d be dead by the time anyone picked up.” For my cellphone, it made far more sense to program in the local police emergency number. That almost always gets an immediate response.
If 911 didn’t answer quick on your cell phone, they won’t answere any more quickly from a landline.
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It’s the same center, and the calls come in on the same lines.
No. This is not a joke. It was reported on NPR, complete with audio of the recording you get when you try calling the Washington State communications department.
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PAD
Well, I found this dailyuw blog entry by Adam Magnoni from April 7.
QUOTE:
The department of communication recently held a faculty meeting where it was proposed that professors consider giving up their office phone lines to cut costs.
The proposal came from faculty, staff and graduate students within the department who formed a committee to discuss ways in which the department could save money. The eradication of the phones was an idea they all shared. The idea was then proposed to professor and interim department chair David Domke.
Domke looked at the numbers and couldn’t disagree.
“We looked at our budget, and phones were one of the highest costs,” Domke said. “It’s approximately $40,000 for two years (including phone lines and hardware). If we don’t have to lay off a staff person because we cut back our phones, that’s a good trade off.”
Domke said the department has already begun to cut back in other ways, specifically paper usage, by switching to double-sided copying, minimizing the amount of inter-office paper mail being sent and urging everyone in the department to plan ahead when mailing out-of-office material so that overnight or two-day mail costs can be avoided.
Giving up phone lines is a voluntary process, Domke said. All graduate students elected to give up their lines, though two phones will remain for their use. All staff will retain their phones, as will a handful of professors.
“People in the department have varying needs for communication,” said Doug Underwood, associate professor of communication. “I’ve opted to keep my phone.”
If a faculty member decides to give up his or her office phone line, it means that personal cell phones and e-mail will become primary means of communication. Privacy issues, though, are now being called into question.
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There’s a little more to it if you click through to the blog, but I tried to just post the most relevant bit.
Frankly this leaves me still somewhat confused as to whom is giving up what, if anything. Maybe newer info would clarify it more.
I tried to find anything specifically regarding an NPR report, but I didn’t see anything in a cursory google.
If anyone else finds something newer which adds more detail I’m sure it will be posted, but for now that’s the best I could do.
As a college professor, I would NEVER give my students my cell phone number or call them from my cell. I have over 200 students a semester, and it would guarantee daily phone calls at all hours… I would never have time off!
On the other hand, not having an office phone is ridiculous. Assuming for the moment that students would prefer to e-mail their professors, don’t the professors themselves need to make calls?
For a bit of context, the University of Washington is experiencing _huge_ budget issues, on the order of a 30% across the board cut. Everyone’s waiting for the axe to fall and see how many of their colleagues are laid off. So, these are extraordinary times, and if they can turn off phones to save someone’s job, great!
Which doesn’t affect the humor of the situation in the slightest.
Personally, today is my last day as an employee of the University of Washington, and then I’ll pack up and move 2800 miles east for a shiny new job as a programmer for Think Geek. So, I’m glad that the impending financial apocalypse here put me in job search mode to find something so nifty!
(And nit: It’s just Washington. Washington State is the cross-state rival.)
Kirby, he did mention that it was the UW – the use of Washington State was to make sure we weren’t confused (again) with Washington, DC.
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Back in the late ’70s, a columnist in the Tacoma News-Tribune told of a waitress he encountered at a DC restaurant, who was actually willing to bet money that there was no such thing as a Washington state. (Kind of ironic that the reason the state was named Washington was because the other leading candidate, Columbia, was nixed out of fear people would confuse it with the District of Columbia…)
I’ve heard similar tales of people listing “West Virginia” as their state of residence and being informed that they lived in Virginia, because there was no such state as West Virginia. And then there are people who don’t realize that New Mexico is part of the United States…
I am also a college professor and I use my phone daily. I have over 300 students a term, and while I use email a LOT, I would never, ever, give my students my cellphone number. I cannot count the times I have used my office phone to get students the help they need, such as hooking them up with the counseling center, academic support center, or student health center.
Heaven forbid a real emergency arose requiring a call to 911.
At my college I work at, we are required to give the school our personal cell phone numbers(private college). I said I didn’t want to, and was told “do it or be fired.” Most colleges are debating doing away with landlines in student rooms. I would say the only students who use landline phones in their rooms are RA’s who are required to.
Students are now required to bring their own phones for their rooms, but no one does anymore. It’s all cell phones baby.
Having worked as a bookkeeper, I note the irony but I still don’t blame them. Office phones are incredibly expensive. Cutting the phones probably means keeping at least one person on staff.
Also, phones are evil. When email takes over the world, we will all be the happier for it.
Rather than getting rid of the phones to save money, why not get rid of 3-4 of the higher ups who gobble up money and don’t actually do much. Okay, they schedule meetings and have votes on whether or not to keep the phones. But it’s the faculty, secretaries, custodians, and facilities staff that keep the university going.
I’ve said for years that our department chair could fall off the planet and we’d survive. If our secretaries and custodians all called off, we’d be non-functional in less than a week. That’s not to say our chair isn’t busy. He goes to lots of meetings with the dean’s office, etc. But I really we could get by with fewer deans and more support staff! And the phones could stay, too.
A world without phones won’t make ME happier. Email has its place, but the human voice can’t be replaced by text on a screen.
Along similar lines, when Lisa was in grad school at UC-Riverside, two buildings on campus were rated as the most seismically unsafe.
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They were, naturally, the buildings housing the Geology Department and the Department of Public Safety.
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TWL