Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Online class enrollment

Today marks the start of the online class enrollment exercise for me and my fellow year one UOL schoolmates. The window spans a total of four days but who in the right mind would not login on the first day? So, with common sense comes chaos. Nothing unusual.

The time slot which I was given was 1000 hours. Some people had 1100 hours so I wondered if that means I had a one hour privilege. I was on standby since 9:50, opening four tabs on Firefox which had the login page with my user ID and password typed inside their respective fields. All that is needed is the hitting of the Enter key.

And that's where it all begins. It took a little longer than usual for the page to load. I thought that was perfectly normal since there are a few thousand users entering at the same time. However, after a couple of clicks here and there, I got kicked out of the system, for no reason.

I proceeded to switch tabs and hit the Enter key. I was inside again, in less than five seconds. But after another ten seconds or so, the same thing happened, I was O U T. Feeling a little irritated and desperate, I moved on to the third tab. Enter.

It was worse. I got an error message stating that there was some authorization error and one should proceed to contact the system administrator. I took a deep breath and sighed. It was time to change tactics in the game. I clicked on the Start button to look for (not so) good old Internet Explorer.

My experience from dealing with "official webpages" tells me that IE is always the best bet if you want sensible loading times and proper alignments. SIM proved me wrong today. The process of logging in was unexpectedly smooth but the loading of pages took an infinite loop.

As five minutes of anxiety passed by like five years, I was still staring at the same page. Time to call for help, literally. I picked up the phone and dialled the Student Services hotline. The lady on the line seemed helpless but gave me an advice which was ironically constructive.

"As you are using IE 10, you might encounter problems because IE 10 is still not yet compatible." I was really pissed off when I heard that. It was only stated that Internet Explorer 8 and above are compatible at the login page. I guess that was quite misleading after all.

Unexpectedly, she suggested me to switch to Google Chrome. I always believed that Chrome will never be a choice when it comes to "official webpages". But since I had nothing to lose, I decided to give it a try. Honestly, I cannot remember when was the last time I used Chrome on my lousy Acer laptop. Half a year ago?

It turned out to be an effective substitution. Pardon me for sounding like a sports commentator. Everything went smoothly. Login, clicking, loading time, nothing seemed to be causing any trouble for me. And guess what? I completed the whole thing in five minutes without any sighs.

Moral of the story. Download a wide variety of browsers just in case you need that very one and continue to bash IE.

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