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BY MICHAEL GLUK

In print | September 18, 2008

Recently, a student brought to The Phoenix staff’s attention a puzzling phenomenon quietly afflicting Swarthmore’s entired student body.

Those of you who missed the ‘typo’ above probably feel less affected by this puzzling affair, as it too is an issue of just one letter – indeed, you may not have noticed it at all – but somebody certainly deemed it newsworthy.

The story is this: previously, a student’s assigned e-mail address had invariably consisted of this first letter of his/her first name followed by the first six letters of the student’s last name.

However, this year, it was noticed that some students whose last names contain six or more letters have e-mail addresses with only five letters of their last names.

“The very simple fact is that we goofed,” Information Technology Services Director Gayle Barton said in an e-mail.

“What?” said a perplexed Ming Cai ’11 when asked whether she had noticed the blunder. “I mean, I’ve never noticed, but I feel like if I were a freshman forced to include the sixth letter of my last name every time I wrote out my e-mail address, I’d be outraged at the loss of precious time I could have saved by stopping at the fifth.”

Michelle Walters ’12, whose address stops after six letters of her last name, feels differently about the tragic truncation of her name by one essential consonant:“mwalter1….seriously? Walter? I’m so irritated about having to inform my friends and professors of my absurdly masculine e-mail address. I feel that my e-mail address forcefully misrepresents my identity,” Walters said.

In an effort to mitigate the harsh effects of their error, Barton and ITS created a system making it easier to find correct email addresses, acknowledging that the mistake created some difficulties. “One risk of any predictable ID system is that people will guess at an ID and guess wrong. (Does it end in 1? Does it end in 2?) That’s one reason why we worked to set up the e-mail address directory service this summer. In Swatmail or in a desktop e-mail client you can type in a person’s name and get his/her e-mail address.”

Disclosure note: Ming Cai is a Phoenix columnist, but had no role in the production of this article.

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