Instead of writing a long, long article in which I’d just get upset, here’s what really grinds my gears considering the tech/digital side of studying at the University of Hamburg. It’s all stuff people afraid of or uncomfortable with technology just do, but I find it hard to bear from time to time.

• The presentations and lecture notes are made available online, yeehaw, but in a pretty subotpimal - and by suboptimal, I mean shitty :) - way. You have to navigate to the single dates of a lecture. But not all the time, sometimes the data sits on the lecture’s ‘home page’. Inconsistency ftw!
• Therefore, after every lecture/every day, we practically have to log in to the crappy university software and search for the new lecture notes. Instead of getting a frakkin’ email. I’m not arguing that that’s hard, I’m not that lazy. But it’s so unsophisticated once you realize how easy everything could be in times of email, dropbox and all that stuff.
• Instead, we get emails that inform us about every uninteresting event that’s happening, but:
• No email when an important deadline’s up.
• We get files named like this: Ppt0000009.pdf
• And that are the bad ones, I admit. But the good ones are like this: Lecture_1.pptx. Don’t mind telling us of which lecture!
• We get 160-pages-documents as .doc instead of .pdf.
• Today, we got a five-step manual as .pptx file.
• We get mail addresses that follow the scheme firstname.lastname@studium.uni-hamburg.de. That’s fine if you’re going for the worst email address possible. The university owns the domain uhh.de. That’s not great either, but at least it’s not that long. If I was a famous professor and member of the University of Hamburg, I’d be ashamed instead of proud to give away an email address of the mentioned scheme.
  It basically says: “My university sucks at everything that has to do with IT.” And that is just sad for a place that should be innovative, striving after progress and all that stuff. Where do we get when in 2011 at a university in the country of engineers, the most simple tools technology gives us are used with the expertise of a three-year-old?