Student IDs are a great thing. They provide student discounts, allow you access to your building, you can add money to them buy books and access your meal plan. Now imagine you can’t do any of the above because of a new system put into place, that doesn’t work properly at the moment. Welcome to the NU Shuffle Spring 2003.

Last Friday, my ID broke in half. Since it obviously wasn’t going to work, I went to the Customer Service center and got a replacement card. When I asked how long it would take to work, I got the following answer. “Everything will work immediately. We have a new system in place, so that everything is transferred to the new card immediately.” Bull. Not only can I not buy food or books, I can’t even get into my own building! I was stuck outside for 20 minutes Saturday night until someone else finally swiped their card to get me in (thank you, Northeastern, for building such great security into the outside of the West Village complex).

Well, I tried to give it the benefit of the doubt. I waited a few days for the “new system” to perhaps kick in. It still didn’t work on Monday, so I called the Customer Service center, where I was told that my ID allowed me access to Burnstein and Rubenstein, but not West E, which is where I live. I then had to go to the Proctors Office on 106 St. Stephens, where, to no surprise, they couldn’t fix my location because no one could get into the system to do it and it would take at least a day.

Thinking this was the end of hell, I went to the bookstore to get two more books I needed. I gave the girl at the register my Husky card, and, guess what, it didn’t work! It said “Please contact debit center,” even though I had sufficient funding beforehand.

The system worked fine before this quarter. Now, all of the sudden, everything changes. Nothing works, and you have people lining up in the Registrar’s office all trying to get their cards to work. People need to be able to get into their buildings and have access to money. The response I got when I told them of my problems was “The person who can fix this will be in at 8:30 tomorrow morning.” Good thing I don’t have to leave my apartment tonight, because I’d really hate to be stuck outside at 2 a.m. because there’s no one there to fix the problem after 4:30 pm.

– Nick Mantia is a senior journalism major.