Temple Struggles with Diamond Dollars System

BY IRISH HAINES

Temple has had frequent mishaps where the Blackboard Transaction System was down, or “unavailable”.

This included Diamond Dollars, meal transactions, and print transactions (including the free printing allocated by the school). 

Dining Halls at Johnson & Hardwick and Morgan Hall began having students write out their Temple identification numbers by hand. This, along with the Student Center food court not able to take meal plans, made lines and wait times much longer than usual.

The lack of communication on Temple’s part only frustrated students more. Jay Neemeyer, a Sophomore who had to wait out the dining hall lines at Upper Morgan, said it was especially irritating because of the confusion about when the system would be back up.

“In addition to impacting student’s meal plans if it was all of the diamond dollars that would also be stuff like printing which I think is really important right now with it being close to finals,” Jay said. “I didn’t get any formal communications from the university about it I found out through my roommates telling me. That’s just really irritating because part of it is the university not owning up to its mistake but also not being transparent about what’s going on, the extent of what is effected and they didn’t even make an announcement when it was back up again so it left student’s kind of in a state of confusion”

Brigid O’Brien, an employee at the Bagel Hut, said lack of announcement from the school led to them to think their individual system was malfunctioning when Diamond Dollars could not be accepted.

“When the system shutdown we weren’t really aware that it shut down we just kept getting the notification that the connection failed on the machine,” Brigid said. “I think it’s irresponsible of Temple to not have said anything especially because it was down for so long and because diamond dollars are used so widely all over campus is not good on their part.”

Computer Services offers a System Status page on their website here for cases like this.