Pass: Chipotle gives away free burritos

After closing for the day Monday for a staff meeting, Chipotle Mexican Grill’s recent promotion gave back to its customers in the most effective way — free food.

With the recent E. coli scare contaminating several Chipotle restaurants, it is no surprise people may be skeptical about purchasing their food. The franchise responded to this incident by holding meetings at each of their restaurants. The business then thanked all its customers for their patience with a free food offer. Some people might still be shaken by the outburst, but free food is hard to resist as a college student; if the company is willing to admit its mistake and try to improve then I think a free burrito is worth the risk. Good job to Chipotle for trying its best to regain customers and feeding most likely a large portion of NIU students.

Fail: Blackboard malfunctions

Blackboard was down for about 10 hours Monday without any warning. I can handle a small glitch, but things get difficult when class materials are not accessible. Students and faculty that had Blackboard open during the time of the crash were suddenly ejected off the site no matter what they were in the middle of. There was a written explanation of the outage on Blackboard’s site, but no clarification message was sent out to students. Faculty should still be able to host classes and communicate with students without having to rely on one single program. If they do not agree, then maybe creating back up files for Blackboard links can offset any future malfunctions.