BlitzMail first debuted on the Dartmouth network scene in 1987. Over 20 years later, BlitzMail plays a crucial role in shaping the social dynamics of Dartmouth's campus, in connecting and uniting the campus collectively. Blitzmail fills inboxes on a daily basis with e-mails ranging anywhere from unread campus-wide blitzes (D2U anyone?) to highly personal, well-crafted gems (like the ones from your mom).
"Where else can you arrange a game of pong, schedule office hours, conduct 'war,' catch up with friends and communicate en masse to campus -- all in one system?" Brendan McVeigh '10 said.
Blitz is versatile. It breathes life into your social calendar. It is also exceptionally user-friendly and accessible. Learning the ins and outs of Blitz is elementary, requiring minimal skill. Which is good for students who are always on the go, like those at Dartmouth.
Furthermore, the convenience of Blitz provides us with a ready excuse to opt out of real, face-to-face conversations with our peers. I mean, honestly, can't you just blitz me your notes?
And, seeing as some of us receive more radiation exposure from the glow of our laptop screens than actual ultraviolet rays emitted by the sun, Blitz is more effective than SPF 50 at keeping us healthy. Why would I ever need to leave my dorm again, especially in this weather? I can totally order EBAs online ...
Still, in just two and a half more years, Blitz will be unceremoniously ripped out from underneath me as I graduate and achieve sketchy alum status. If I don't start weaning myself off blitz now, I'll be woefully unprepared to go out into the real word, sans blitz-bombing and instant-messaging response time for my e-mails. The fact remains that, despite my undying love for Blitz, it is an inadequate, outdated e-mail client, desperately in need of a makeover. The one redeeming factor Blitz has is its monopoly on determining one's status in the social hierarchy on campus.
You think I jest, but maybe you should get your head out of your textbook and start checking out Blitz terminals more carefully. It's a jungle out there, with alpha males pounding the keyboards and alpha females slyly looking out of the corners of their eyes as they silently feast on recipient-suppressed lists as unsuspecting prey.
Don't kid yourself -- what's in your inbox matters. Five hundred megabytes of potential social capital are at your fingertips, eagerly awaiting your Ctrl+M command and your Ctrl+D discretion. So please, do us all a favor and use your inbox capacity responsibly. No unsuspecting "blitz-jack" victim wants to be exposed to campus as the Dartmouth Chess Club's most frequent blitzer, or the resident minstrel of the Dartmouth Medieval Enthusiasts. That's why Blitz has folders. Make sure to label your folders with nondescript titles to throw off particularly vituperative blitz-jackers, who especially relish exposing the faults of those hapless souls who fail to log off Blitz terminals correctly.
Grab a pencil and a sheet of paper for this next part, because this is perhaps the most crucial criterion in determining one's status in the BlitzMail hierarchy at Dartmouth. How many blitz lists are you a member of? I'll give you a minute to ponder this.
DOC lists, like Ledyard and Chubbers, don't count unless you've actually attended at least one event in the past month, because we, as freshmen, went to the students activities fair, and signed up for blitz lists like there was no tomorrow. Take Bill Gerath '11, for instance.
"I made the mistake as an innocent freshman of going to the activities fair and giving my name to a bunch of organizations I thought I just might want to be involved in. Of course, I never got involved in any of them, but that simple indiscretion probably accounts for about 60 percent of the blitzes in my inbox," Gerath said.
Does having a seemingly packed inbox every time he logs on boost Gerath's Blitz popularity on campus?
No.
As any avid Blitz fanatic knows, generic blitz lists in which there exists no lasting affiliation or bond are the Dartmouth equivalent of spam.
"Department blitz lists are the worst! The Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Departments has a blitz list that they blitz out to whenever they need more course enrollments, and I find it so annoying," Brandon Aiono '11 said. "They also never repress the recipients, so I always want to reply all and be like 'NI HAAOO!'"
So how many blitz lists do you personally oversee and blitz from? And when I say "blitz from," what I'm really asking is: how often do you abuse your access and send out campus-wide blitzes when your black North Face goes missing from Chi Gam for the umpteenth time?
Though somewhat tangential, I would like to digress briefly to applaud an emerging minority of the Dartmouth community for being willing to risk all common sense for the sake of fashion. This new trend of wearing couture winter garments when going out and then feigning surprise when some unscrupulous hoodlum makes off with your brown leather Burberry gloves and fur-lined parka, and then feeling compelled to blitz out to all of campus, still has me slightly baffled. Remember, it's a fraternity, not a discotheque.
But don't feel too bad about clogging my inbox with these important announcements, like asking for my assistance in finding your single cubic zirconia stud in a pile of snow in -10 degree weather because you were unable to pull off the pirate look successfully. Because everyone loses stuff sometimes -- a green Patagonia jacket, size "sexy," for example.
At least all you blitz list abusers out there seem to adhere to the same cardinal rule when it comes to sending mass blitzes: you use the recipient list suppressed feature. This essential function of Blitz not only safeguards people's fragile psyches when it comes to throwing exclusive social events on campus. Those who don't use this feature often find they must suffer the inevitable consequence: blitz war.
Ben Hemani '10, a notorious instigator of blitz wars, sums up his motives behind initiating blitz wars rather succinctly.
"Well, mainly I insist on starting them because I am an ass," Hemani said. "But also, I find that people learn to stop sending out unrepressed recipient lists by having me abuse them."
Word, Hemani. You're taking vigilante justice on the BlitzMail airwaves to a whole new level. Now if only the people who had lost their coats would forget to hit suppress...
We've now covered the essentials for establishing good standing in the BlitzMail hierarchy, meaning a digression into "blitz faux pas" is in order. As one might expect, blitz faux pas are usually embarrassing and not completely desirable. However, they can also be unmatched in boosting one's BlitzMail street cred, depending on the severity of the faux pas committed. So, for those of you contemplating a mass restructuring of your BlitzMail image, consider trying a variety of the following.
Dana Malajian '10 had an awkward BlitzMail situation with a professor during her freshman spring. The night before her final exam, Malajian sent her professor a blitz inquiring as to whether there would be a curve on the final. Much to Malajian's chagrin, the professor informed her there would in fact, be no curve. Naturally wishing to share her dismay with a fellow classmate, Malajian went to forward her professor's response to her friend, quickly adding "FCK ME!!!" to the bottom. (I'm assuming you now see where this is going.) Malajian ended up hitting reply instead of forward. In other words, Malajian told her professor to "FCK ME!!!" the night before the final.
"I tried to cover it up, saying my friend had hijacked my computer to play a mean prank, but needless to say taking the final the next morning was incredibly awkward," Malajian said.
Malajian is a member of The Dartmouth Staff.
Other blitz faux pas, outside of the realm of academics, usually involve sending either drunken blitzes or explicitly sexual blitzes to the wrong recipient -- or a combination of the two.
One male Dartmouth student relayed a blitz mishap that occurred during his sophomore summer. Having just ended a long-term relationship with his girlfriend of a year, he decided to "get back into the game" with one of his good female friends.
Instead of asking if she wanted to order EBAs, watch a movie, or have him walk her home, this sophomore stud muffin went in for the kill, stating very suggestively: "Hey, my roommates are gone for the weekend, do you want to come up to my room?"
Naturally, his friend freaked out and quickly made up an excuse to avoid going over to his room. Our highly inebriated, unidentified male friend, however, felt sincerely bad for making her uncomfortable, and sent the following blitz at around 5 a.m.:
Subject: Hey
sorry about last night. i'm not a sexual predator. i guess a less sketchy way to try to make out with you would have just been going in for a kiss rather than asking you up to my room. regardless, i was out of line.
sorry,
brotein
Upon re-reading this blitz several hours later (and considerably more sober), our anonymous male felt mortified for referring to himself as a sexual predator, and even more humiliated for calling himself "brotein." He avoided his female friend for the rest of the weekend out of the fear that she and her friends were having a hey-day at his expense. Three days later, however, he received a response to his blitz from a female professor at the Thayer School of Engineering, suggesting he had directed his blitz to the wrong person.
It turns out the professor and girl in question had similar sounding names, hence his confusion when attempting to apologize via a drunken blitz. Lucky for our anonymous chap, his friend never found out that he referred to himself as "brotein" -- unless she's reading this now and putting the context clues together as we speak.
A slightly less embarrassing blitz faux pas, but a faux pas nonetheless, is requesting a return receipt to a blitz when you are sending the blitz to a good friend. And when I say "good friend," I mean you sit down and break vegan bread together at Collis, and are not just acquaintances who say "hi" to each other in the Collis mosh pit where you fight over the said vegan bread instead of sharing it. The same is true of using the recipient list suppressed feature when blitzing a close group of friends, where everyone knows each other included on the list. Don't do it. You're not that cool.
Matt Scott'11 offered his own insight on the situation.
"Blitz is great, but I've definitely received some sketchy blitzes that were personal, but were recipient list suppressed and had a return receipt. I deleted them immediately," Scott said.
Savvy Blitz maven, Karen Doster '11 exposed the true paradox of Blitz.
"BlitzMail pretends to be an actual e-mail client, when, in reality, it's blatantly not," Doster said. "Any e-mail program where you can change a reply-to to an e-mail address that isn't yours, while simultaneously blitz-bombing someone at random, makes you question the program's legitimacy as an e-mail client."
And, as of late, Dartmouth College agrees with the sentiment expressed by Doster. The Task Force on E-mail and Collaboration Technologies is currently discussing replacing BlitzMail with a newer, more effective e-mail client, outsourced to Google or Microsoft. Both vendors offer a whole slew of features currently unavailable to BlitzMail users, such as calendar features, font formatting and nested folders.
"If everything goes according to plan, the final recommendation from the task force will be submitted to the Administration during the spring. And, provided the recommendation from the task force is accepted, we hope to be able to move forward with the implementation of a new e-mail client by summer," said Ellen J. Waite-Franzen, vice president for information technology and chief information officer of Computing Services.
Student Assembly focus group representative Elena Falloon '11 said that the Assembly hopes to conduct a student survey in the near future that will measure the characteristics of Blitz that the student body wishes to maintain.
"I'm little sad and nostalgic at the thought of having a different e-mail system than Blitz, but the new functions available are far superior to what BlitzMail can currently offer," Falloon said.
"Also, it'll still be called Blitz," she said. "Blitz will always be part of Dartmouth."
Whether this proposed new-fangled technology will carry on the beloved idiosyncrasies of the BlitzMail client we currently use, no one can tell for sure. But the social hierarchy embedded in Blitz isn't going anywhere. HTML-rich text or not, Blitz dictates the daily life of the average Dartmouth student.
