Doing my part in an attempt to help cut something from the budget at the school, I tried to think of what was the most annoying thing to students that we could get rid of. But since the university doesn’t seem to be interested in firing the deadweight like all of the assistant-assistants on campus, I had to look somewhere else.

Then it came to me, after a trip to the rec. In terms of use, the blue fee card is one of the most annoying things on campus that is also useless. The middle of the blue sheets that appear before every semester are dedicated to only the blue fee card and then much wasted space. So to save the school money, it should eliminate the blue fee cards.

Anyone with a bus pass, or that visits the rec a few days into the new semester, knows what a hassle the fee card is.

Another piece of junk mail arrives from the school and students have to punch out the fee card, find the old one, throw it away and secure the new one somewhere where it won’t be lost.

But if you forget that, you will be denied use of your student bus pass or access to the rec, making you walk back across campus, or making you spend another dollar for the use of services you pay for anyway.

And it all made me wonder what the purpose of the card was.

The school and CyRide seem to be very concerned that students might actually be getting their money’s worth by using the services for a semester after they graduate, and of course we couldn’t have that on this campus.

But the alternative is rather simple. We already have to carry around another piece of identification that proves we are students on the campus to allow us to participate in many activities – the ISU student card.

The ridiculousness of the bureaucracy involved in having multiple cards isn’t lost on most students.

Making the ISUcard single and all-purpose would be easy too. The card is already a food service card and a credit card, so it would be a simple step for the cards to be scanned so that they could say if student was currently attending classes. In fact, this works out for the school, because the card would be updated, where the fee card is sent early to students, and a person could conceivably drop all their classes, just to have the precious fee card and use all of the powers that have been bestowed on it.

I wouldn’t expect CyRide to install anything like a scanner, though. It already takes long enough to wait on the student that has to dig and find his fee card, and then pick out all the pennies he has in change.

CyRide will have to take the loss on the chin for the handful of graduates that stay in Ames and use their services.

Instead of saving a third of a sheet of paper for every student, the school could also eliminate the top portion of the sheet.

The only importance of this, after all, is to show sensitive personal unnecessary material.

The bottom half is the only important portion of the blue paper because it carries the schedule of classes but even that can be gotten rid of.

After all, students can print out schedules from Access Plus or just write them down. I wouldn’t expect new and transfer students to do all this, but it still cuts costs for a large portion of the student population. Instead, the school should send a single slip of paper with a student’s name on it, and on the back it reads “you are attending ISU next semester.”

In this period of belt-tightening it makes sense for the middlemen and women to start paying attention to all the little things on campus that are a needless waste to both students and the administration.

Looking around campus every day most students can spot two or three things. Finding these things and making our voices heard could very well save the classes jobs of professors and other important things on campus that we do need.

Blaine Moyle is a senior in English and secondary education from Des Moines.