A little spam is well worth the money saved

There are few truths in this world. 1. Death. 2. Taxes. And for students, 3. The ever increasing cost of schooling. Maybe No. 4 could be the role of an overbearing, overprotective, irrational mother figure that many in power seem to have some great need to occupy. This time it’s nothing important, just the proposed axing of a moneymaker – the USU Student Directory, where all our addresses and digits are printed. ASUSU makes $9,000 off this thing that we’re not entirely sure more than half of students even know exists. Our guess is more students could recite the intricacies of Ron Paul’s entire campaign platform than could claim to have read their USU Student Directory. It’s basically free money. Free money that when taken away would have to be replaced from the pockets of the Ramen-noodle-gobbling masses. We all pay hundreds of dollars in books, thousands in tuition and fees and almost $2 for Cokes. Why then, ASUSU, should we have to pony up some more of our hard-earned American currency because you are afraid the directory’s existence is a privacy issue? Oh no, people are going to spam us. Gasp. Please mommy, don’t let the pharmaceutical companies take up space in my mailbox, or even worse – my snail mailbox. It’s already stuffed full with mailers from Smith’s and adverts for the Golden Retriever silver plate collectors’ series. The inconvenience of spam is so minimal – ever heard of spam blocker? – we’d rather put up with it than pay the extra 50 cents or so it would cost each student to pick up the slack if the directory is done away with. You can eat for 50 cents – that’s about three packages of Ramen. You can play for 50 cents. Many arcade games are how much? 50 cents. You can save it and gamble it away on a Spring Break trip to Vegas. The amount isn’t important, it’s the principle of the thing. Why take a perfectly good money source and say, “No, we just like the feeling of watching you guys go without a game of Mrs. Pac Man”? Is the money dirty? Are these blood directories? Is the mob involved? A yes to anyone of those would be a valid reason to cut the directory. As long as we don’t owe the North Koreans a boatload of enriched uranium for printing these things, we – as a student body – in the spirit of not paying any more money, can put up with the possibility that somebody is going to be able to find our addresses, phone numbers and e-mails – it’s called Google, and we’ve heard it’s pretty user-friendly for those scammers that are tech-illiterate. And it’s not like the directory is giving out our Social Security numbers. The university already tried that once – pro bono.