This week, Dickinson is rolling out a new way to record working hours. This comes after major backlash from everyone working on campus because of Workday. 

Due to the backlash, Dickinson has majorly improved recording hours with a Message in a Bottle System. Student workers will write their name, location, start time, and end time on a piece of paper, seal it with cork and red wax, stamp their family crests on the red wax, and then send it off to HQ where it is then recorded. One may be asking how the bottles get to HQ. Well, students place their bottles outside, and then next time it rains, the bottles are washed away where hopefully they maybe, possibly, perchance, make it to HQ. Where on campus HQ actually is remains unclear.

Now, you may be wondering, is this system efficient or reliable? Sort of. So far in the test runs, the system has had a 12% success rate, which is actually somehow higher than Workday, so it looks like this system will stick. One of the major problems encountered so far in test runs is that it won’t rain for a few days and then the bottles get broken into by the campus squirrels. Fortunately, they realize quickly enough that the messages aren’t food. Unfortunately, they don’t realize it before they scurry up the nearest tree, so many messages have been found hanging on branches. 

For students who work for the college off campus, like theDickinson farm, there is a different system in place. Due to the farm being too far away for the rainwater to carry the bottles, Dickinson has bred and trained a fleet of pigeons to carry student’s hours to HQ. 

Simply write your hours on paper just as you would for the bottled messages, but then tie them to the leg of a highly trained pigeon who will carry your message away. They are usually unsuccessful in actually bringing the messages in to be recorded, as they have been known to intentionally untie the messages and drop them. But the pigeons, like the message in a bottle system, are still easier to use and more reliable than Workday.