Where Elm and Broadway meet, there sits Christ Church of New Haven, or as I like to call it, The Antichrist Church of New Haven.

See, it has these bells. Not jingly-jangly like the Harkness bells, oh no.

These bells sound like Quasimodo is chucking cannonballs at them in a drunken rage. Sometimes they ring for 20 minutes at a time. And then right when you think they’re about to stop, they keep going. Chances are almost everyone in Stiles, Morse, Trumbull, Davenport and Pierson has experienced this terror.

But wait, there’s more. These loud, intolerable bells, they ring every quarter hour. Last time I checked, the Black Death wasn’t taking people down on Elm street, and we don’t tell time by looking at the sun anymore, so we don’t need bells to alert us every time fifteen minutes passes. If I wanna know when more wasted minutes of my fleeting life have passed, I can look at my watch. See, there’s this thing called “technology.” It’s great. It removes the need to have loud, clanging pieces of metal.

Like Kip Dynamite, I love technology, always and forever. How did college work without technology? Seriously, imagine being in college even as recently as the early nineties, back when people called fro-yo “frozen yogurt” and flannel was the fabric of choice. Before the age of Al Gore’s information superhighway and DVD’s.

It must have been like the Stone Age.

Imagine how much more complicated the schedule-making process would be without the internet. You would have to walk to a building and actually write your name on a sheet of paper to sign up for a class. That would require getting dressed, sweating, interacting with other humans, and other things that no one has time for these days.

How did students do research without Google, Wikipedia and Lexis-Nexis? Are you telling me they used “books”? I guess that means they actually had to go to the library and have a proficient understanding of the Dewey Decimal system, two things any self-respecting student of the modern age avoids.

How did students even write their papers back then? Did they do it on pieces of aged parchment, in cursive, with a quill by candlelight? And then, how did they proofread without spell check? White-out must have sold like Soundgarden CD’s. Once finished such an arduous process, did students turn in their papers using carrier pigeons? Or maybe the Pony Express?

Without e-mail, how did undergrads send problem set answers to each other? Did they whine to TA’s and professors in person?

Without the above technological advancements, I would have failed out of school long ago. But technology, like having sex with Pamela Anderson, is a double-edged sword. Pretty much all of my time-wasting in college is a result of technology, and it has almost caused me to fail out of school.

Thanks to technology, I can illegally download all of my favorite songs. Even better, I can put all my songs on an iPod and listen to them on the way to class so that I don’t have to talk to anyone.

Now, instead of putting in all the effort required to hit “skip” a few times during Aerosmith’s latest softy-crap-that-is-being-peddled-as-rock CD, I can just illegally download the least terrible tracks from the album. In a few years, CD’s are going to overtake cigarettes as the most pointless item on which one can spend money.

Without the Internet, I wouldn’t be able to watch clips of newscasters saying “blow job,” Asians dancing to R. Kelly, or Kate Moss doing coke. I would have to yell across the common room to communicate with my suitemates instead of chatting over Instant Messenger. Kids wouldn’t be receiving spam from porn sites and subsequently asking their parents why so many Websites are advocating shaving the family’s pet cat.

Many of you wouldn’t be able to read this column if it weren’t online. Unlucky for you, it is.

Imagine a life with no Halo, Goldeneye, or Grand Theft Auto. Granted, Generation Xers had the classics like Mario Bros., Contra, and Sonic the Hedgehog. But 2D is no way to live. It’s like Jason Giambi without the steroids.

(By the way, is it a rule that every platforming game made before 1996 had to have an underwater level and/or a snow level with deadly falling icicles? Discuss amongst yourselves.)

Probably the most important development of the last few years was the cell phone. It has come a long way since the days of Zack Morris’ shoebox-sized mobile phone. I remember when I had a little worn-out piece of paper folded in my wallet with all the phone numbers I knew. We must have been wandering around like ants, mindlessly bumping into each other, tangled up in the wires of a landline society.

What did people in the nineties do without the above technological advancements? Play four-square? Board games? Talk to each other? Without Snood and thefacebook.com, they must have been very efficient.

No wonder the economy did so well.

So, thanks to technology, we have video games, text messaging, Internet porn and a tanking economy. Clearly, society has advanced in the past ten years.

To commemorate, open your windows on Sunday, circa 9:44 p.m. and listen. Hear that obnoxious clanging in the distance? The bells of technology are ringing.

Carl Williott won’t be Quasimodo this Halloween; he’s tired of the bells.