From causing extreme inconvenience to almost jeopardizing Barnard housing, we hate you Duo.

June 30, 2022. 11:15 pm. I had exactly 45 minutes to go through my remaining two Barnard health forms before the deadline, the prerequisite to receiving your dorm assignment. I was working at an overnight camp where phones weren’t allowed with campers-we kept them in lockers in the office. I entered the staff lounge to retrieve my phone, but the lock on my locker? Simply would not open. I tried that godforsaken combination upwards of twelve times, with the help of other groggy counselors, and none of us could make it work. Our hypothesis: they gave us the wrong locker combination. After what felt like too many minutes of twirling the same dial, I grew increasingly frantic and attempted to log into the portal on another counselor’s laptop. Would’ve been a foolproof plan if not for…

CAS Multifactor Authentication is in progress… Authenticate with DUO or click here to QUIT.

To avoid boring you, long story short: 

Talia freaks out. Talia texts camp administrators who give her all 24 lockers’ combinations to try. They do not work. Finally, heroes appear with lock cutters. Goodbye lock, hello telephone. Talia verifies her login with Duo, and the forms take six minutes max. Talia gets housing.

And most importantly, Talia develops a lifelong grudge against Duo Authentication. 

Duo is the most inconvenient app and process for literally zero reason. Any time I want to check my classes, go on the housing portal, log into a new browser, I need to wait an extra (seemingly) five minutes to pull out my phone, wait for my silly little app to load, and click a silly little button. If my phone’s in another room or out of reach, there’s no way out of it. This app is practically begging us to be screenagers.

I have plenty of classes where a solid five minutes at the beginning of class is wasted on professors logging into their portals. The culprit? Always Duo. Think about the amount of learning we are missing by waiting for a stupid green app to load! Time is knowledge.

Meanwhile, what is the point? What’s the worst that could happen? As one wise Sidechat user puts it, are the hackers going to log in and pay tuition for us? Book us a practice room? I think I’m willing to take that risk. 

I sincerely appreciate the concern toward our digital safety. And yet, I think there are other places we could be focusing our attention at this lovely little university. If hackers want to buy us some more meal swipes, so be it.

Duo image via Bwog Staffer