Telemarketing bulletin board invades telephones, slows voicemail process
While the bulletin board may be an effective way to reach students, it lengthens message checking and shouldn’t be over used.
COMMENTARY
Sandy Stafford

Picture this familiar scene: A student walks into his or her residence hall room and realizes that someone has left a voicemail. The student dials the voicemail extension, enters his or her password, and ... hears an announcement about the bulletin board?

The well-known computerized voice describes the bulletin board as a “new feature” that has been added to the voicemail system. Before the student can listen to an voicemail messages, there may be announcements on the new bulletin board.

This past Friday’s bulletin was from Coach Patterson. The general idea of the message was something like, “Come support the Horned Frogs against the SMU Mustangs this Saturday at 6 p.m. Watch us win the Iron Skillet. Go Frogs!”

Before writing a letter to the editor, please understand that this is neither an attack against Coach Patterson nor against his football team. Kudos to those guys, in fact, for winning the Iron Skillet on Saturday.

Instead, this is a grievance about the “new feature” in rooms campus-wide. Publicizing TCU football is understandable, but must it go as far as telemarketing? Will other coaches also be leaving bulletins on students’ phones? What about deans or sponsors of student organizations?

Hopefully the new audio bulletin board will not have to support traffic like that found in TCU e-mail accounts. If e-mails from TCU Announce, different sports teams and sundry other school-related lists cannot capture students’ attention, will bulletins on their phones really do the job? At least with e-mails, students have the option to read them in any order they see fit and to skim over and delete the ones in which they are not interested, with minimal irritation.

In fairness, a student can also skip the bulletins on his or her phone by pressing the pound key twice, and he or she can delete them with 7. But this only adds more buttons to the long list of numbers and passwords already on the way to voicemail from people the student actually knows who perhaps have left important messages.

Some students were surprised by the bulletin on Friday and frankly found it somewhat invasive. Even with the best intentions, this form of telemarketing is annoying. TCU should stick to other marketing methods and leave students’ voicemail system in peace.

Sandy Stafford is a junior theater/television major from Nederland. She can be contacted at (s.a.stafford@tcu.edu).