New Thread: Should we charge users when they cancel without advanced notice on the Raith system?

[Yuichiro Kato]

Hi all,

The cleanroom at UC Santa Barbara had a reservation system where qualified 
users for that machine recieved notification e-mails when reservations were 
cancelled. Of course, you can choose whether to recieve such notifications 
or not at any time via the reservation system, since you are only interested 
in those notifications if you are waiting for that instrument.

It worked pretty well, also because of the psycological effect from the fact 
that an email is sent out to many people every time you cancel reservations. 
People try not to make unnecessary reservations, just because they don't 
want emails sent out saying "[Reservation Cancelled]  E-beam Evaporator #3 - 
June 12 2003 8:00-9:00 AM by xxx".

Such a system would at least get rid of cancellations without notifications. 
Perhaps coral can also ask the user to input the reason for cancellation 
within 24 hours, to help SNF maintainance.

I think that repeated no-shows and excessive cancellations are 
irresponsible, and they should get restrictions to reservations.

As with charging for the cancelled times, for most of us, it shouldn't be a 
big deal, since we are capped. (http://snf.stanford.edu/Access/Fees.html) 
Most people probably work more than 25 hrs/month and if you work more than 
160 hrs/month in the cleanroom, man, I'm sorry for you :) In my opinion, 
being charged for cancellation doesn't cost us (or rather the PIs) anything 
and will make Raith look good to the SNF management, so why not?

Cheers,

Yui




+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Yuichiro Kato
Postdoctoral Researcher
Dai Group
Chemistry Department
Stanford University
tel: (650)-725-9156
fax: (650)-725-0259
e-mail: ykkato at stanford.edu