Did You Try To Sign Up for the Speakers List Today via E-Mail?

Many readers said here and in e-mails to me that they had watched their computer clock and hit "send" precisely at 8:00 am.  They were sending e-mails to the Board office to sign up for the Board meeting speakers list and they could not send them sooner than 8:00 am. 

Problem was, people were getting e-mails back that they sent their e-mails about 45 seconds too early and therefore, were invalidated.  Many people challenged the district and here's what came of that:

The district will be accepting time stamps after 7:59:12, since their system was .48 minutes late:

"I am writing to provide an update to the situation regarding your request to provide testimony at Wednesday’s Board meeting. Staff within our Technology Services department confirmed that in comparison to official time source on the internet, such as www.time.gov, the district time system is about 48 seconds slower. Because of this, we will be honoring those requests that show receipt in our system at or after 7:59:12 as having been received at 8:00 am, and therefore at the appropriate time to be included in our testimony requests, in the order they were received.

I appreciate your understanding as we worked to resolve this issue, and hope you can accept our apologies for any confusion this might have caused.

Thank you,

Lauren Fode"


Of course, that will make it interesting to figure out who came when via phone AND e-mail.  In any case, I believe that the speakers list will be so long that they will expand it to 25, instead of 20, speakers.  

 We won't know until Tuesday afternoon who made the list. 

Comments

Anonymous said…
Yes, it happened to me too. There was much back and forth with me insisting that Google (gmail) and Apple (my Mac) were probably more precise that their internal servers and that I would also send them a screen shot of MY time stamp when I got home but they just needed to look at the time stamp on my original gmail email (8am!).

They also failed to alert me to a potential problem until 8.13am!! I was thinking they must be still changing their clocks manually over there or something. Crazy!
seattle citizen said…
I know a teacher whose classroom clock has read 12:03 since August. The teacher, after repeated emails, was told that fixing it was a "low priority."
After a month of clocklessness, teacher and students going slightly nuts, the teacher bought a huge, plastic, battery-powered analog clock and hung it over the classroom clock on a piece of yarn...
Anonymous said…
Yes, this happened to me. I had some back and forth about it with boardagenda@ and publicrecords@ and got nowhere. The boardagenda@ admin told me it wasn't equitable to use anything but their own servers' time. I challenged her assertion that it was equitable to use an arbitrary, wrong time, but figured I wasn't talking to the right person.

At 11:03, I wrote this email to the Ombudsman:

"Dear Ombudsman and Board Agenda Administration:

It seems that part of the email system is listing incorrect email receipt timestamps that are approximately 45 seconds earlier than the official time. These timestamps directly contradict another part of the email system; for example, see the reply below that lists my email as having been received at 8:00.

Before publishing the list of Board speakers for this Wednesday, can you work to reconcile the extent of email timestamp error? For instance, you might coordinate an email send, pressing send while looking at the official US time at time.gov. If you see that the email receipt timestamp is 45 seconds before that, you will know that the timestamp system is that at least that far off.

I believe I was erroneously omitted from the speaker list because of this error in your email system and want to understand how you plan to rectify this before the Board meeting on Wednesday. "

Then I got the email saying that they'd essentially followed my suggestion.

--JvA
n said…
At least they changed our classroom clocks over the weekend. In the past, we sit during class time and watch the darn things skip minutes until the correct time is reached. Just another classroom distraction. It was a nice change to get there and have the correct time.

I miss the old wired-in analog clocks. We do teach analog time as part of math.

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