Minnesota State’s (formerly MnSCU) Vice Chancellor and Chief Information Officer of IT services Ramon Padilla Jr., and Associate Vice Chancellor of Infrastructure & Operations Ross Berndt could not hold back their excitement on Mar. 2 as they sent out an email informing the Minnesota State school system that they had found yet more ways to make the StarID system confusing.

“Everyone thought they were finally safe from changes,” Padilla said. “For a while, we thought they were right. But when the guys at the top decided on a rebranding for Mnscu, we knew we struck gold.”

Padilla and his team immediately went to work on the system as MnSCU announced the rebranding effort, thinking of how they could use this to further frustrate the Minnesota State community.

“It couldn’t have come at a better time,” said Berndt. “We were finally running out of ideas to screw with people. But then with the rebranding, we realized we had another opportunity to change the sign in system and add extra confusion onto student’s Minnesota State experience.”

“It’s great,” Padilla added. “Less than a year ago, we needlessly made it so that the address you send emails to and sign in with would be different, causing mass confusion. People are just barely now used to that system—with this change we can now once again have students and staff swearing at their computers, not realizing why they can’t sign into their account and addressing emails to incorrect addresses so that the message didn’t go through.”

When Padilla and Berndt found another oppurtunity to cause even more chaos, they pounced on it.

“We wrote an email for every campus’ communications officer to forward to the students of that university,” Berndt explained through tears of laughter. “However, we wrote it to be as confusing as humanly possible. We said that it won’t impact email addresses, without specifying if that is for addresses to send emails to or the login address. Then we immediately followed that up by saying it changes your account login credentials–without specifying if it was for your Minnesota State account as a whole, or just for your email credentials!”

At press time, Padilla and Berndt were rolling on the floor with laughter, citing changes they later planned to make to The Star ID system and the planned aimless changes in layout to the newly named D200L Bright-As-The-Sun Space Deluxe.