There was a party at the MnSCU main office building in St. Paul, Minn. this past weekend to honor the 1,000,000th wasted hour of MnSCU students, faculty and staff trying to figure out the new email system.

Larry Pudla, MnSCU’s Head of Information Technology, was quite excited about the accomplishment.

“Those million hours could’ve been spent on valuable employee work, student collaboration and learning, or even administrative improvement,” Pudla said. “Instead, due to our decisions to change a working email system into something that is needlessly complicated, they were spent trying to just log into a simple email account. We couldn’t be more proud.”

Pudla noted that even though users that accidentally tried to log into their email with “@smsu.edu” or “@mnscu.edu” instead of the clearly necessary and logical “@go.mnscu.edu,” on average only wasted about 15 seconds, it added up over thousands of users getting mixed up several times a week.

“It really is beautiful,” Rick Bennit, MnSCUs Vice Head of Information Technoloy said. “Not only did we add a weird website to put after your @ in the email address, but we managed to change the receiving email addresses too. Instead of just addressing an email to a person @smsu.edu or @scsu.edu, you now have to add a ‘@my’ in front of any address. While emails addressed with the ‘go’ are currently still forwarded, we plan to discontinue that later. This will inevitably cause thousands of important and timely emails to go missing because some idiot forgot to add the ‘go’ in the email. Just IMAGINE the ruckus we’re gonna cause!”

As Pudla and Bennit munched on the cake which read “To more future inefficiency,” they reminisced, referring to the sign-in system they had created as “artfully confusing.”

“A few years back, we got everyone incredibly befuddled on how to access their student accounts and emails with the StarID system,” Pudla said. “Just as those moron students and staff were starting to figure things out again, we throw this curveball at them, and oh MAN, it’s been funny to watch the results.”

The pair also shared a hearty laugh about creating a new employee account for all student workers and not telling them about it, where 20,000 important emails have thus far been sent and never opened.

“Students were complaining that their professors and bosses were sending emails to an account [students] didn’t even realize they had,” Bennit said. “But we informed them in the D2L Brightspace main news bar. Or, somewhere, I don’t even really know myself. I mean, come on, everyone reads the D2L sidebar! There’s no way you could pass school if you don’t, and students have nothing better to do.”

As the party ended, Bennit and Pudla were cracking jokes at how utterly hilarious it was to require a symbol be added to all student account passwords, but to make sure sign-ins completely stopped working if the students ended their password with an apostrophe or “^” symbol.

“I’m just excited for the day we can get to at least 50 characters per login to D200L Bright-As-The-Sun Space Deluxe.” Pudla said, smiling. “That’s our plans for the name change to D2L once we hit our 2,000,000th wasted productivity hour due to sign-ins. Because at MnSCU, we are nothing but dedicated to inefficiency for all our clients.”