(Charles Hotel) RC student Barry Dinacola won the Section N Career Rep election last week, fulfilling Dinacola’s lifelong dream of getting a job to officially forward e-mails to classmates.
“A thank you to every one who voted for me,” yelled an elated Dinacola at his victory party in the “Dinacola Command Center” at the Charles Hotel. “I’ve been forwarding emails since the first time I got on the internet 12 years ago. I knew if I stuck with it and forwarded every damn Darwin Award and Brooks Brothers discount, one day it would pay off and I would finally get a job that fully utilizes my forwarding capabilities.”
Dinacola also addressed his critics. “For years a bunch of people, mostly my father, have been telling me to stop wasting my time forwarding the Dancing Baby and Conan O’Brien’s Harvard Class Day speech because no one is ever going to give me a job and pay me for forwarding e-mails.
Well guess what Dad? I just got a job forwarding e-mails at the best business school in the world – the Harvard Business School. I just don’t get paid anything.”
Section N elected Dinacola 88-3, as students knew from the start that Dinacola possessed powerful forwarding capabilities. “He was the first guy to forward that Jim Rogers thing out of the whole Class of 2005,” said sectionmate Mary Simon, an avid Dinacola supporter. “But he won my vote when he forwarded a really interesting article on the launch of the New Beetle, just one hour after we did the New Beetle case in Marketing.
Above the URL link to the article he wrote ‘FYI–interesting article on the Beetle…’ And you know what? He was right. It was an interesting article.”
The three people who voted against Dinacola are less enthused about their Career Rep. “I feel like Section N just opened up a Pandora’s Box of forwarded e-mails from Barry Dinacola,” said Eric Vest, co-Intramural Rep. “In the last two days alone Barry has sent the section an Excel file with all the company presentations on it, a link to that Fedex MBA commercial and a chain letter that we all had to send to five new people to avoid three years of bad luck. Imagine what it’s going to be like when Career Services starts asking for our resumes and organizing career lunches. We’ll end up getting more e-mails from Barry than we do from Sean Alex Gardner about the Caribiz and Dominican Treks.”
Dinacola has some big plans to increase the actual reading of forwarded Career Services e-mails. “In the past, Career Reps have over-utilized the “urgent” function in Outlook when forwarding e-mails from Career Services. Students became desensitized to the concept of urgency. My plan this year is to use the “urgent” function sparingly, thereby improving the value of marking something “urgent,” which will make students much more likely to read a message marked “urgent” when it arrives in their inbox.”
Dinacola also plans to frequently change the blue-text message he puts at the top of his forwarded emails. “Sometimes I might put ‘Check this out…’ Sometimes I might put ‘Please read…’ and sometimes I might put ‘In case you didn’t see the original…’ By mixing things up, students will never get bored with my forwards and will be more apt to read the rest of the message.”
Despite his Career Rep time commitments, Dinacola wants his family and non-HBS friends to know that he will still continue to forward them e-mails.
“I know how much you enjoy it when I forward you inspirational messages about friendship and funny games like Catch Michael Jackson’s Baby. So I promise I won’t stop forwarding you messages. Ever.”
