You walk into Davis Library and immediately spot a long line at the printer. After waiting a few minutes, you hear a librarian say that the entire Carolina Computing Initiative Printing system is down — this would be inconvenient for some, but for those who have papers due in 5 minutes, this could be ruinous for a grade.
Sure, in an ideal world all papers should be completed and printed the night before, but for many students, this is just not realistically possible. And in an ideal world, CCI printers would never break, but unfortunately this is not realistic either.
So while the problems themselves cannot be easily fixed, creating a medium to inform the community of a crash would greatly reduce the amount of stress for students and inform professors of why their students’ papers might be late.
This could work similarly to Alert Carolina or simply be a website that constantly updates which printers are connected to the servers and the ones that are collapsing.
This simple fix would prevent students from running building to building looking for a working printer, fearing the consequences of a late grade.
Printers are going to mess up, and while annoying and possibly panic-inducing, it is a problem that cannot be stopped and no particular group should be blamed. All that can be done is to make sure that every person is informed of what the current state of CCI Printing is so that plans can be made before late points come into effect.
