Students have been using the MoneyMate system at Mississippi State since the mid-1980s. But since the prepaid spending card service moved off campus to area fast food restaurants in August 2003, it has caused trouble for some.
Neil Norton, a senior mechanical engineering major, uses his card to buy meals, but last weekend he had trouble at the local Sonic and Taco Bell restaurants. Both restaurants told Norton the MoneyMate system was down.
“It was an inconvenience; I had to borrow money,” Norton said. “If I had some sort of notification, it would have never been a problem.”
Last weekend’s MoneyMate issues stemmed from a hardware problem, said Donna Buckelew, manager of the campus card office.
The system was down for nearly two days, but this was only the second time MoneyMate has been offline since 2003, Buckelew said.
“This weekend we did have a hardware error that caused the system to need to be reset. The university reset it as soon as they heard it was a problem, but we weren’t notified that there was a problem until Monday morning. We fixed it just as soon as we knew there was an issue,” Buckelew said.
Freshman electrical engineering major Miles Byrd said he has had difficulties using his card at fast food restaurants around town as well.
Sometimes the problems are not with the system, though. Restaurant employees can cause problems with Money-Mate if they do not operate the hardware efficiently, Buckelew said.
“The Money-Mate system runs fairly smoothly,” Buckelew said. “We do take it down for scheduled maintenance on days we don’t think business will run as usual, such as school holidays.”
“We notify the vendors, but we don’t notify students,” said Buckelew. “MoneyMate outages are unforeseen, so we’d have to have advance notice to notify students,” she added.
Buckelew said campus-wide e-mails were not sent because it could interfere with the university’s SPAM policy.
“MoneyMate is great, but they should see about notifying students about problems in the future,” Norton said.
“I think MoneyMate is a great idea,” Byrd said. “It’s handy, but I can see how if it gets shut down it can be a major problem.”