If you happen to be one of those people who occasionally likes to have something to be angry about — I know I am — then the Internet is the perfect place to go to get your blood-a-boilin’. You could visit Pat Robertson and let him tell you why — exactly — you are going to hell. You could check out Noam Chomsky and listen to him explain how — seriously — we live in a totalitarian police state. Or, if you are not the political type, you could visit a baseball site and listen to “sawks” fans gush about “Pedroier” and “Youk.” However, the best way to really tick yourself off might be to put on your Greek armor, sail to Crete, and try to navigate the dark, sinister labyrinth that is the Student Center.

Just as King Aegeus paid little heed to the young men and women he sent as a sacrifice to Crete every nine years, little heed was paid to us, the students, in the design of this new system. Dating back to the beginning of 2007, according to the Registrar’s website, there has been one student input meeting on the design of the Student Center. Input has been much more frequently sought from other groups. For example, the course advisory group sits representatives from across the campus and meets two or three times every season to offer advice — but they forgot to include a single student.

Perhaps I am being too harsh. The system, after all, is in English, the primary language of many students here. So that is a plus. Then again, the system is cumbersome. To access your class schedule in grid form — the useful and normal way to view one’s schedule — from the University of Wisconsin homepage takes seven clicks. This number really means nothing, however, since there is no benchmark to compare it to. Instead, consider searching for a class. To find Calc 221 on the old online timetable, it took about five clicks. With the Student Center, it takes seven clicks of the mouse, one sign-in, several loads and reloads of pages, and one drop-down menu. This may seem trivial, but if technology is supposed to make doing something easier, and already has made doing that thing easier, why is the new way harder?

In the interest of giving the system a fair shake, the current mess we deal with daily is actually a mess in progress. It is part of an ongoing process to combine everything from class registration to textbook requirements in one easy to find place. This plan may yet work; the fully developed Student Center (complete with a schedule generator) is scheduled to be unveiled next spring or summer.

Until then, we must prepare ourselves for at least one, and maybe two more forays into the depths of the Student Center as is. Treacherous as any labyrinth, pitfalls await us at every turn. Beware especially the “Home” button in the upper right hand corner of the window. It lurks, prepared to take anyone foolish enough to click its inviting hyperlink to a barren and alien webpage. Furthermore, if the hapless navigator attempts to use the search function he finds on this foreign site to try and find his way back to the familiar shores of the Student Center, he quickly gets the result he is looking for, except there is no link to click on that would take him back to his beloved Student Center. So he sits, abandoned on an Internet island. Grudgingly, he must close out the window, and begin his strange journey anew.

Perhaps this voyage has been doomed from the outset. A quick look at some systems the Student Center claims to be modeled after is quite revealing: two are broken links, one is to a high school course catalog, and one is a UW biology search engine looking suspiciously like the old search engine from the online timetable. So, for another semester, we poor Greeks bravely steel ourselves for the journey to Crete to face that maze of death. Then again, even Thesius got a ball of string to find his way when he fought the Minotaur — we don’t even get a back button.

Joey Labuz ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in biomedical engineering.