Blackboard and the course registration system crashed last week, but not many students cared. Both problems got fixed rather quickly and the worst thing that seemed to happen to anyone I know was they had to postpone doing their homework. When I get a justification to procrastinate, I’m not going to complain.

On the Northeastern LiveJournal community, which I’ve lurked on (but never posted) for almost two years because I can occasionally get good story ideas or an impression of how students feel about an issue, a few people expressed a bit of anger about the technical snafus. But they weren’t really mad, as far as I could tell, because they weren’t ranting like the standard angry people on the Internet. Instead, they wrote haikus.

For the uninitiated, a haiku is a form of Japanese poetry that is made up of three lines. The first and third lines each have five syllables, and the middle line has seven. A haiku is traditionally a form of nature writing, but like all great things, Americans have reappropriated it.

At 1 p.m. Thursday, a poster started the conversation with a little masterpiece that went like this:

Blackboard system down Online quiz deadline grows small Bob Weir is scapegoat

The Bob Weir the poster referenced is the vice president of Information Services, responsible for the web-based technology the university uses. He posted a note on the myNEU portal explaining the problem and promised a solution as soon as possible. It took a few days to get everything up and running, and when everything was working again, Weir took responsibility for the problems.

It was refreshing to see that kind of honesty and openness, because we don’t see that kind of behavior from other school officials often.

Another poster felt the same way and wrote this:

Wait wait wait. Hold up. Northeastern really takes blame? I don’t believe it.

While the Blackboard problems were mostly just annoying, the course registration system had potential for problems. We have to register for classes before every semester and we’ve essentially been using the same system for years. Northeastern really should learn to get it right.

Thursday night, a poster wrote this:

The class looked so nice I couldn’t wait to sign up Today, it disappeared

Course registration really matters. Almost two weeks ago, I completed my senior clearance and last week I had to pick the classes I’d be taking in my final semester at Northeastern. I had to get into Law of the Press, a 300-level or higher elective and core courses in the humanities and arts field. None of them were hard to get into, it would have been an inconvenience if I needed to get into some obscure, five-person seminar.

When I could have been doing homework, or working on an article for class, or even writing this column, I did something far less productive, though, truly, much more enjoyable. I wrote a haiku. I would have posted it to the LiveJournal thread, but – alas – I’m not a registered user.

I couldn’t log on But it was not all bad news Finally: free time.

– Matt Collette can be reached at [email protected].