Brief Comments on Centralized Systems

At both SLU (Sveriges Lantbruksuniversitet) and Uppsala University, students are allowed to use the public printers available at the libraries on either campus. Using the system is easy, but setting it up has been one of the hugest pains I've had to deal with while studying here.

In order to print, you need a print card, which is your login card for whatever printer you wish to use. You get this card about 2 weeks after you've begun classes and things get rolling. However, you still can't print because you have no credit on the account. To get credit, you have to add money to an online account with a company called PayEx, which acts like an online bank, which then must be linked with your university account.

Usually this would only be a moderately annoying process, but this has turned into a real project. To begin with, I was given two different student accounts along with two different P-numbers (personal number- it acts much like a SSN in the US but here it's used for many more things) and different logins. Up until about two or two and a half weeks ago I'd been using the wrong account and found this out the day I created the PayEx account. After I'd linked it to the wrong one.

I ended up going back to the IT center, asked them about the accounts and was told that they would take care to delete the incorrect one and that I should use the other. Okay. No problem. Then I had to go to the printing desk to make sure my card was switched over to the correct account and would not log me in as aute0002 instead of aute0001. Then I had to log into the PayEx system and switch the account from being associated with aute0002 to 0001.

Since this all takes some time to process (and note that Swedes have one of the MOST laid back lifestyles I've ever seen, with breaks for nearly anything you can think of), one of the administrators gave me fake money--basically adding credit to my account without money to back it up--to spend on whatever I needed to print. This was supposed to be fixed within the next few days, but a week later, I printed again and realized the printer was still deducting from the fake money instead of the 100 SEK I'd deposited initially.

What?

So back I go to SLU's campus (which, mind you, is about 6 or 7 km south of where I live) to see what the problem is. They don't know when I go to the printing desk, so the man there takes my number and says Björn (the helpdesk head honcho I take it) will call me back.

Eventually we set up a time to meet and fix all of this. That would be today at 11:00. I came back to the campus, logged in, and with his help we figured out the problem now was that because I was not a Swedish citizen and because about a week ago the government demanded that banks enforce tighter control over the security of their systems, I had to send PayEx a whole mess of information to verify my identity, including a copy of my passport.

Greaaaat.

When I left the office, I forgot a notebook there and got a call from Björn again when I was back in the downtown area. I biked back to Rackabargsgatan (the street my housing compelx is on), grabbed my passport, and headed back to campus again.

THIS time, I'm hoping everything has been sorted out. Björn complains about the centralized systems too, noting that they are safer this way, but infinitely more troublesome when something goes wrong. If I was studying here for a year or more, this wouldn't be too much of a bother, but being on exchange for only a semester means it feels like more trouble than it's worth. But hey, how else am I going to print out my Ryanair boarding passes?