The furiously flashing light red light sends delight down yourspine and mixed signals to your already overwhelmed brain. Anentire day of misery, exams and hopeless cafeteria food seems todissipate for that split second when you are greeted by an awaitingvoice mail on a campus telephone.

The flashing red light represents different things to everyone.It could be your best friend, your teacher, or perhaps your mothercalling to see how your Calculus test went. You rush to the phoneto hear the message. You lift the phone and immediately receive amonotonous taped greeting from some 90-year-old woman.”Voicemail. Voicemail,” she chants.

After following the now routine message retrieval procedure, youdiscover that it is simply a message from your RA. He is ontop-secret search and recover mission for the hall’s onlyvacuum. After erasing the message, the red flashing lightmiraculously disappears. You really think nothing of it, and moveon with your life.

Many students are unaware that their dorm phones are animportant means for the administration to communicateannouncements. One of the imperative announcements concerningstudents regards to SMU’s inclement weather policy. Whileup-to-date information will be posted on the SMU home page, theuniversity also sends out a message to all campus voicemailboxes.

On Saturday, many students received the university wideinclement weather announcement. Sadly however, the sun rose and thesnow melted away. Darn.

Soon all the hope and excitement of a snow day faded, and moststudents tried to gear themselves for another school week. Therewas however one lingering problem that many dorm room residents hadto face. After students made numerous attempts to clear their voicemail, the flashing red light continued to blink feverishly.”What the heck is going on?” some questioned. Do not bealarmed; the flashing light is not an error. Since all campusphones have three separate mailboxes, the inclement weatheradvisory is sent to all the mailboxes.

To access your alternate mailboxes, follow theseinstructions:

For extension mailbox No. 2, enter *5 to access voice mail. Thenenter password — 8 and last four digits of telephone numberand 2 (8xxxx2) followed by #. Next, enter the mailbox extension— 2 followed by #.

For extension mailbox No. 3, do the same except enter the numberthree in place of two.

Now you should be free from that infuriating flashing redlight.