The UMB Customer Service Department has created an exciting new interactive website called the UMB Community Front Page (see article on page eight, “UMB Gets its own Community Front Page”). The dashingly designed new site boasts listings such as events and classified advertisements, and is a truly heartfelt attempt at becoming the online connection to campus resources.

A convenient one-stop-shopping type service to find out about almost anything that’s happening on campus for the commuting, non-traditional, on-the-go UMB community is just the kind of thing whose praises The Mass Media can’t help but sing. We get all giddy over websites like this because they help to relieve the sense of disconnectedness felt by so many students at commuter schools like UMB.

Since so few students are able to take advantage of all the different clubs and social resources offered here at the University to make new contacts and form new social networks, the website offers everyone on campus a simple way to keep up with the endeavors of the school’s athletics, find cheap textbooks, buy not so cheap sunglasses, and learn about many other things, from career opportunities to INS (Immigration and Naturalization Services) updates.

The new Community Front Page website is just another step in the right direction for the University. In offering automated and easily accessible services by way of the Internet, the website will only benefit the UMB community.

There’s never been as good a time as now to figure out how to use your free lifetime UMB e-mail account, since all the benefits offered to you by the Community Front Page website are only available to faculty, staff, students and alumni with UMB e-mail addresses.

Let’s say you wanted to sell a pair of your fashionably obsolete sunglasses, for example, which initially set you back way more than the actual cost required to produce the glasses, and you wanted to know that they went to a good home. Naturally, you would want to sell them to someone else who is living by the high moral standards required of those people who are associated with the UMass Boston campus. Unfortunately, if you don’t get your UMB e-mail squared away, you will be forced to risk selling those shades to some mysterious individual off the street who will probably end up sitting on what was at one time your most prized possession, your glasses. We at The Mass Media are required by law to not make stuff like this up; it could happen.

Some of these features, like the classified ads, The Mass Media makes a legitimate attempt to offer to those of you on the UMB campus; but without a steady availability of backs in the office to pick up the telephone receiver and take a request for a classified ad, The Mass Media just can’t consistently offer these wonderful services to you, our clientele. For that, we at The Mass Media will never be apologetic; however, we are quite happy to see someone else on campus take the initiative, grab the bull by the horns and just downright do something about it!