Marvin Wenzel was distraught. The night before, he had seen a pretty brunette girl at the 80s dance with a ponytail off to the side, wearing bright pink spandex pants and a tie-dye tank top. He could totally see her sports bra as she danced with that one guy to Wham’s “Take On Me.” It was orange.

Marvin knew two things. First, he knew that her name started with the letters L, A and U. Second, he was convinced that he was madly in love with her, her great looks and awesome sense of 80s fashion. As he went to the Whitman College Student Content page and proceeded to type in those three letters into the search query in the lower right hand corner of the screen, he froze in fright.

People Search was down.

Massive uproar ensued as students became increasingly unable to look up that cute guy or girl they had ogled the night before. The frustration only continued to grow as RAs were no longer able to identify the new members of their sections. Scramble leaders could no longer creep on their scramblers’ mug shots, and soon forgot where they lived. People were unable to look up their fellow students’ addresses and then find their houses on Google Maps Street View. Absolute catastrophe.

A certain RA who chose to remain anonymous stated that she would have no freaking clue who her residents were.

“I’m absolutely helpless without People Search at my disposal,” she said with exasperation. “Now I have to actually spend time with them in my residence hall. It’s so much easier when I can type in the bare minimums into the computer.”

People Search is often creatively termed “Creeple Search,” “People Stalk,” “LDAP” and “The Magical Place Where the Secrets of my Classmates are Stored and Accessible.”

The service available to Whitman College students resumed hours later. All rejoiced. There was cake, and Marvin finally got the details on the mystery girl of his dreams.   The orange sports bra sporter was Lauren Nimby, campus address Prentiss room 347, home address 487 Whidbey Place, Renton, Wash. 98059, campus phone number (509) 459-8958. Additionally, her People Search mug shot was really cute.

Marvin now has plans to ogle her from across Prentiss Dining Hall and to check her Facebook account with unusual frequency without making any real advances. In the event that he makes a chance awkward conversation with her, he’ll even be her Facebook friend.