Students Petition to Replace Online CRISP With 2001's Hal

Students and faculty have been complaining about CRISP for years, and when the Registrar's office finally decided to do something about it, both groups celebrated. But technological progress often comes at a cost, and when the Registrar's office replaced the venerable, hated phone CRISP system with a new, hated online CRISP system, they unwittingly stepped on Engineering senior Harvey Sanders' dreams.

Sanders was the dynamic student leader behind the initiative to replace the "boring" CRISP lady with Michigan alumnus and Darth Vader voice James Earl Jones, but when the CRISP lady went the way of The Tom Arnold Show, so did Sanders' dream.

"It was the worst day of my life," said Sanders. "Even worse than when I got an A- in EECS 483."

Sanders, distraught, binged hopelessly for the next few weeks. "I played Quake 20 hours a day," he said. "I guess it wasn't all bad, but I did feel pretty lousy even when my frag counts were really high."

When his desperate yet dorkily incompetent friends desperately attempted to pull him out of his Quake cocoon by watching 2001: A Space Odyssey with him, Sanders was struck with an inspiration.

"I was like, 'wouldn't it be cool if we replaced the online CRISP with Hal?'" he said. "I was reborn at that moment."

Endowed with fresh purpose and hordes of dorkily incompetent friends, he set out on his new quest. The first step was the construction of a simulated Hal-registration system, which was accomplished in a few days.

"It's still a little buggy," said Sanders. "It's got this tendency to call everyone 'Dave', and it keeps trying to lock me out of my apartment, but other than that it's pretty good. Oh, and it wants to kill me, but I've found that's not really unusual."

Other students are less satisfied with the system, however. "When I tried to register for Orgo, all it said to me was 'I wouldn't do that if I were you, Dave' and it wouldn't let me register," said LS&A freshman Laura Hollinsworth. "When I got an override from the department, it relented, but I'm pretty sure it's trying to kill me now."

Despite misgivings about the system's safety, Sanders forged ahead. A petition was started and accumulated over 1,000 names before being sent to President Bollinger, who promptly ignored it. Surprisingly, the computer's attempts to start the conversation in earnest by threatening to kill the President did not help matters.

Sanders thinks the project is stymied. "We could sit in somewhere, but I don't think any of the dean's offices have computers with Quake on them," he said. "I guess it's just not going to happen."

Ever the optimist, however, Sanders plans to keep on petitioning for an interesting class registration system. "Well, if Hal CRISP keeps trying to kill people, maybe we could CRISP with a telepathic embryonic star baby or some sort of weird solid black monolith," he said. "That would be cool too."

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