Wifi Outage Impedes Learning

The Dartmouth Secure server, the main source of wifi for campus, unexpectedly went down at midmorning yesterday. The unexplained outage lasted from approximately 11:05-12:43. Economics 10: Statistical Methods, taught by Professor William Trentos, meets during this time and experienced the dramatic fallout of the wifi failure.

Firstly, most students in the lecture experienced a state of denial. Many reported constantly refreshing their respective Facebook pages, Pintrest boards, Youtube videos, Reddit threads, and in the case of creepy Carl who sits near the back, their Pornhub pages. After a few minutes, it became clear to most class members that there was indeed a wifi outage. Students then had to face the incredibly difficult task of engaging with the Econ material for the remaining 50 minutes. Reactions from members of the class were mixed.

Jack Smith, ’18, comments that around minute 12 without Reddit, he began to shiver and sweat, reporting an acute headache and shakiness.

Cynthia Cross, ’15, stepped out of the classroom pretty soon after the outage, commenting that once she “actually started listening” she “realized that this was not French 2.”

Ben Miller, ’17, says the outage forced him to leave a lot of the Buzzfeed quiz he was working on unfinished. Now, he said, he has “absolutely no idea which Sex and the City character I am” but instead has “like a pretty good understanding of probability theory.” He said that he hopes the administration will realize that these DartmouthSecure outages have “real consequences.” In fact, he says that because of this distraction he will now have to stay up pretty late catching up on videos of dogs that look like the cast of Scandal.

Justin Michaels, ’16, counts himself as among the lucky few in the class that were unaffected by the outage. He was spared by the Sudoku game he had pre-installed on his computer. Michaels says he was “super relieved”, commenting that 45 minutes of unadulterated focus on Professor Trentos, the award-winning Economics author and researcher, would have been “literally horrible.”

–RJ ’18