Not all E-mail Deals Are Phishing or Bogus

I get hundreds of spam and phishing e-mails at work. For the e-mail account I use for this blog, I get thousands of offers, spam, and phishing e-mails. I have seen pretty much everyone that has been sent. Although I still wonder why only my girlfriend worries about the size of my penis, that is for another post. So, someone ignoring an e-mail normally wouldn’t cause me to write a post about it. But, sometimes there is an e-mail you should do something about.

My oldest, who is going to University in the fall, got an email last week. She didn’t act on it, which could potentially cost me a large sum of money.

What Teenager Doesn’t Check Their E-mail?

That’s a darn good question. The cost of it is about half the cost of lodgings at University next year. It might be even more from what I can estimate. This is due to one of my children not checking her e-mail in the past two weeks or so. At least she did not check this e-mail specifically.

Evidently the University she is planning to attend this fall has a large 1st year class arriving. This is contingent on her passing all of her courses in high school. The residence board is worried they will not have enough rooms. There might not be enough rooms for all the students who want to live in Residence. Thus, they have devised a brilliant plan (IMHO) to deal with this.

One of their existing residence buildings has fairly large single rooms. The school plans to put bunk beds into these larger rooms. This way, two students can sleep and live where one would have been previously. This should help alleviate some of the overcrowding problem.

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The University's housing folks are smart. They could simply force this on their incoming first-year students, but that might cause some hard feelings. Instead, they turned this problem into an opportunity. They devised a deal to make this an attractive choice. It became more than a stopgap fix to their overcrowding problem. The solution is ingenious, they sent out an e-mail to students going into first year that made the following offer:

1. Any first year student who volunteers for one of these bunk bed rooms would pay only 1/2 of the normal residence lodging fees. This excludes food. That in itself makes it a very attractive deal, but they weren't finished.
2. In addition, any student who is in one of these rooms gets a free laptop computer. The residence will have wireless Internet. The rooms are crowded, so they may not have enough space to study or work. Study areas will be set up. These areas will provide students a workspace near their rooms.

Great deal, don't you think? I thought so when my oldest told my wife and me about it on Monday night. It was after my daughter finally checked her e-mail. However, the deal had been sent out on the previous Thursday. Evidently, by Friday morning all the spots and volunteers needed had been filled. So, we missed out on this deal.

Did we really lose all that money? Not really. However, it does show that sometimes you should check your e-mail a bit more often. Aim for more frequently than once every 2 weeks or so. Lessons we learn in life are never easy. Unfortunately, they always seem to have a large monetary value of some kind.