What Happened???

[AGDee]

Originally Posted by aephi alum

That should not have happened.

My first thought was that you were so low on all three chapters' bid lists that they all matched to quota without getting to your name. But you said your floormate got a call asking if she'd accept a bid to one of the three sororities you preffed - and chapters can only extend snap bids if they haven't met quota.

I'm sorry you were put in the position of showing up at bid day, certain you were getting a bid (because you hadn't been called), and then there was no bid for you. How awful.

I hope the Department of Greek Life can sort out what happened.

I have seen some Panhellenics who give the chapters who did not make quota until a certain time to do snap bidding (say 5 pm) and then chapters not at Total are allowed to offer bids to anybody they want until they are at Total. I've also seen campuses that allowed chapters to snap bid to Total. Not all campuses follow the Green Book to the letter.

It's really impossible for any of us to know what happened to this young lady. It's really unfortunate that she didn't get "the call" in advance and again, it's her recruitment counselor who claims she wasn't on a list to get a call.. perhaps the recruitment counselor just dropped the ball, not wanting to have to make that phone call or something. It's worth investigating just what went wrong.

I'm also aware of one situation where Panhellenic became aware of something in a PNMs background immediately after Prefs and alerted all chapters to the fact and allowed them to remove her from the bid list. Extremely rare, yes. But again, it's impossible for us to know what happened.

[excelblue]

To the OP, I say: ouch, really sorry that something like this happened.

However, based on the previous posts in the thread, I'm really scared about how much several of you trust the computers. As a former sysadmin, I can see a very plausible (and common) case where this situation could happen:

1.) PNMs put in preferences on the system.
2.) System does its magic at night, crunching the lists, ranking, etc. This is an intensive optimization problem...

<meanwhile> ... sysadmin receives a page ... [error on system xyz, I/O error, system crashed]

3.) Just as luck would have it, the system is not written robustly enough, so the PNM has just been deleted off the "unprocessed" list but not fully added to a bid list.

4.) System comes back up, attempts to resume computation, finds anomaly, and "auto-fixes" it based on what it knows: all completed transactions are processed, all incomplete ones are deleted. The girl is no longer on any lists because of the consequences in (3) and thus gets purged from the system during the consistency check.

5.) System resumes and leaves girls SOL.

Yes, the system could have been written to prevent this, but this usually requires lots of care and foreward thinking. Usually, programmers don't really take that much care unless it's something as critical as banking transactions, etc. As a geek, I can say that many of my GDI colleagues have this viewpoint: so what if something like this happens, girl can just go thru recruitment again next year. After all, such a mistake has even happenend before on the systems powering the NYSE, inducing a stock market crash.

Anyways, I hope this gets resolved soon.