Fall of 2007 will bring new things to the Plymouth State University campus. New courses will be offered, new first-year students moving in and–a new system for paying for laundry facilities and using vending machines on campus. Residential Life is doing away with the Debitek System and all Cash to Card machines on campus. The faulty Debitek system will be replaced with a University-owned, online system called Odyssey, which functions by using increments of a student’s Flexcash instead of having to put money on an ID at Cash to Card machines to use the vending machines or laundry facilities. Residential Life decided to do away with the Debitek System because it is no longer compatible with the vendor. The Cash to Card machines are also obsolete to the point that new parts can’t be ordered for them should they break. The Odyssey system will have a lot more flexibility and is expected to be more student-user friendly.
“Now students won’t have to worry about Flexcash and Debitek, there will simply be one,” said Residential Life Information Technologist Dave Carpentiere in an e-mail to Student Senate Parliamentarian Gene Martin. “In the end it’s a convenience for everybody and it saved money since we owned the core product. There is no learning curve on support by the campus because we already administer the product.” More information will be available later this March about the new Odyssey system. “It’s pretty seamless,” Carpentiere said.
Many students can attest to the frustration that the current system brings, Cash to Card, or as it has been called “Eating-poor-college-student’s-money machines,” is something that many are glad to see go. “I can’t count how many times those machines have taken my money,” said senior Kim Bouse, “It’s unfortunate that they didn’t get rid of the system sooner.”