Can you remember that meeting you attended where a fine young gentleman set up and fixed the overhead projector even though no one thought it would work? Do you recall the crash of the laptop you had in your first year and the help that arrived to resuscitate it?

Or is outdated equipment all you think of when you hear the letters IT&S?

If that’s the case, perhaps a refresher is needed: even in turmoil like our recent e-mail lag, IT&S is on the up-and-up when it comes to technology and making sure we get the most out of it.

Recently, the majority of campus has noticed a large fluctuation in the time it takes an e-mail sent within the network to arrive at its intended destination after it’s been sent. While everything has returned back to its previous state of electronic equilibrium at this point, a culprit has already been found and dealt with.

An overwhelmed spam filtering server for the Guilford network that has been in place for six years caused the delay of e-mail delivery on campus. The server passed its technological life span two years ago.

“For these last two years IT&S has put band-aid after band-aid on the server to try and extend its life, and there are no more band-aids that can be applied. We have ordered a new SPAM filtering server, and it should arrive on-campus Monday (March 30) so that we can begin configuring it,” said Chief Technology Officer Kyle Johnson on the IT&S blog in a post on March 28.

“The new server is capable of handling three to four times as much e-mail,” said Johnson. The server did indeed arrive, though shortly after the old one delivered most of the delayed messages and e-mail once again took its depersonalizing toll on our lives.

Johnson estimates that the system delivered “just over 53,000 queued messages” from last week alone. The mail arrived at its final destination, albeit with a bumpy ride. For some it was just in time but for others, it was far too late.

Students across campus complained about inconsistencies, late assignments, and missed last-minute readings. Inconvenience was on the minds of students across campus, despite the new and improved server.

But doesn’t IT&S still deserve praise? Sure, the broken SPAM filtering system backfired and maybe the proverbial band-aids put on the server over the years should’ve been looked at more carefully, but when the system finally crashed, IT&S wasted no time getting a new one.

They do everything they can to make sure that this campus is technologically sound, and have shown impressive service to the faculty and students of this school for quite sometime now.

Guilford may no longer be on Yahoo! Internet Life magazine’s “America’s Most Wired Colleges” like we were in 2000, but thanks to IT&S, we’re still on top of our troubles and breaking new ground constantly.