The words are synonymous with North Carolina A&T. Ask any student, freshman or grad student, and they can tell you what it is. The “Aggie Shuffle” has plagued this campus for years, and it needs to come to an end.

But the truth is the “Aggie Shuffle” is really no more than figment of our imagination. A&T doesn’t suffer from the “Shuffle,” A&T suffers from hypochondria—the fear of a disease that simply isn’t real.

We have all accepted the notion that the “Aggie Shuffle” is just a part of the A&T experience, when really all we need to do is use a little bit of common sense to snap out of the delusion that things have to be this way.

The “Aggie Shuffle” only exists because we let it. You wouldn’t jump in front of a bus and expect to walk away the same as you were before you jumped would you? So then why would you expect for things to fix themselves when no one is willing to use their common sense?

We do not have to accept poor customer service as the norm, not if we demand that people treat us with respect.  Quite simply put, we are used to accepting second-rate service as the first option.

When students call information for a phone number, instead of giving them the number and making them call themselves, why not just transfer them? That would seem to be the most common sense solution.

Don’t send us for a campus-wide marathon run that results in us coming back where we started.

If you don’t know the proper person or location to resolve a problem, why don’t you pick up the phone and ask what to do? This too is nothing more than a common sense solution.

Let’s not clog up the pipelines of communication with frivolous paperwork: digitize all the forms that we have that require so many signatures and email them.

Not only will this keep things from getting lost, and forgotten about, but it would also save A&T thousands of dollars in paperwork, which could be applied to scholarships instead.

Hmm, that seems to yet another common sense solution.

At every turn where we seem to face problems, we do everything in the world but the right thing, which is to use our common sense. If we start thinking about fixing things, and actually start fixing them, just think of how much simpler things would become.

Too many students have left because A&T has turned it’s back on them. Let’s turn A&T around, and remind it of the reason it exists: Us. There can be no university without students. And if all we need to do to make things work is apply our common sense, then lets do that.

Stop pointing blame and start helping. We are all going to have to do this “common sense” thing together. 

Students, it’s our job to ask questions that provoke real answers and responses.

Administration, it’s your job to listen and apply our solutions. Let’s kill the “aggie shuffle,” and snap out of our hypochondria. 

• Dexter Mullins