March 1 is a date that makes returner students want to vomit. Everyone had their laptops out, some had snacks prepared. For some, staying up until the midnight deadline is a marathon.

For those of you who don’t know, signing up for housing is a nightmare. If you aren’t online right at midnight when returned sign-up opens, chances are, you won’t have a room. So of course, you and your friends want to live together and reap the perks of being an upperclassman, maybe even living in the apartments.

However, this year went a lot different than years past. Here’s a brief timeline of everyone’s struggles.

11:50pm. Everyone is constantly refreshing the MySail Housing Portal. Maybe it will open a few minutes early.

11:59. Refresh the page once again and an error message appears. You start to hear your friends down the hall yelling in frustration wondering if they did something wrong. You pull out your phone, hands shaking. By now it’s past midnight, you know people have to be submitting contracts by now.

12:03. You still haven’t accessed the website and by now your friends are frantically opening every electronic device they have trying to get onto the website.

12:11. Resonating cheers down the hall as the first of your friends manage to get into the website. Their hopes are crushed when they sign their name on the form and are met with another error page. Was their contract received? No one knows.

12:13. Your contract submitted 13 minutes after you hoped to get it in. 13 minutes can’t hurt you too bad, can it?

12:15. People are saying they are almost 800 people back in line.

Wow, what a rush there! So, 800 people in front of you. That could fill up the apartments one and a half times. There’s no way you’ll be in the apartments at this rate, maybe with people pulling their roommates in, you won’t make it into Oakview.

I guess this means communal bathrooms, a serious downgrade from the perks of the suite-style rooms.

But you try to quell your fears, of course, because there’s still a shot!

Four days later, an email is sent out to Oakland University Housing students.

“This year, we have seen absolutely unprecedented demand for housing from our returning resident population,” the email read. “From the number of contracts we have received over the past four days, we already know that we will not have space in housing for every student who would like to live on campus.”

Oh good. This means there’s a chance I won’t get to live on campus? After dealing with pipe leaks, Norovirus, a ceiling collapse and residents practically burning the place down with cups of EasyMac, you feel like you deserve to live on campus.

“Bearing this in mind, we intend to proceed with the phases of Returner Sign-Up as planned, honoring our commitment to filling space on a first-come, first-served basis, using the priority numbers you were assigned when you submitted your contract as our guideline.”

Wait a minute. The email is saying that even though the housing website broke and I was pushed back in line, the process will continue as normal?

James Zentmeyer, director of Oakland University Housing, gave some insight as to why the website broke. He said it wasn’t the on-campus server or the off-campus one. It was the portal leading into the actual website.

He said that the website was back up rather quickly and that students were able to submit their contracts just a few minutes later.

People on YikYak joked that they’d live in cardboard boxes next year. Others said they had managed to submit a contract at 12:06 a.m. by sitting under the clock tower. Obviously, OU Housing just became a joke.

The students who were waiting at midnight were punished for the universities problem.

Why did housing not cancel contracts that night? Why did they not reschedule and give time to repair the server?

No, instead, returners are being punished. But hey, look on the bright side! According to that email, we can cancel our contracts for free until May 1.

What housing should do is restart the process with a working server. They should allow students to try again, making things fair this time for everyone, not just students who found ways around the broken links.

If you have your own concerns, go to the RHA meetings every Thursday. They are held at 7 p.m. in Oakview Hall and offer a space for students to express their frustrations about housing. There are outlets to express your voice, but right now, one voice isn’t enough to make housing change.

It seems as if a chorus is needed to make housing realize how unfair this process was.