The new telephone service provided to students living in the dormitories has turned out to be a big problem. The new telephone lines allowed students to make local, intercity, and international calls. In order to take advantage of this service, students were told that they could make a prepayment of an amount of money of their choosing to the accounting office and receive a credit limit for their outside calls. When they reached their credit limit, their telephone line would be cut off automatically. Thus, students would know exactly how much money they were spending on phone calls. Students were also assured that they could check a specified website to see what calls they had made and the amount of credit they still had in their accounts before they reached their prepaid limit.

With a view to keeping an eye on our telephone expenses, my friends and I paid some money (I paid 30 million T.L.) to establish a credit limit for our calls. However, when we checked our telephone bills on the web page this month, we saw that we had enormous debts! I owe Bilkent 37 million T.L., my friend next door owes 38 million, another student owes 10 million to the university. We contacted BCC and found out that they had failed to cut off the lines because of a technical problem in the system. How was I supposed to know that I had reached my credit limit and was spending over and beyond it?

Not only did they fail to cut off the lines, but they also failed to notify us about the technical difficulties they were experiencing! They could have informed us by calling, sending us e-mail messages, or announcing the problem on their web page so that we knew what was going on. I hope that someone will look into this problem because I know of a number of students who are also victims of this lack of communication. We now are expected to pay huge phone bills even though our original intention was to save money. What are we supposed to do?

(Nergis Yalçınkaya, ECON-II)

BCC Responds

Editor's note: Dr. Seyit Koçberber provided the following response after reviewing Nergis' letter to the editor.

Keeping track of outside telephone calls that are made through the University Switchboard system is a very complicated process. To keep a record of phone calls on the internet, the information must be processed by three different computers, which run different programs. Several events occurred last month that adversely affected these programs: a switchboard upgrade, and electricity and UPS failures. As a result, the timely transfer of phone call information to the web system was interrupted.