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Question: Who was the voice of REGGIE, LSU’s telephone registration system?

Answer: A professor and a computer.

Welcome to LSU’s touchtone information system! That voice—the human-sounding one—would’ve been Wiley “Mike” Futrell, professor and director of LSU’s Agricultural Leadership Development Program. Since REGGIE, LSU’s telephone registration and information system, was nixed in September, you can’t hear his talent at work any longer. But ask anyone who attended LSU since 1989 and they can surely do an impression for you, alongside a rant or two about the taxing registration process

Even Futrell had to use REGGIE while working on his Ph.D. (Imagine that double-layer cake of awful: listening to your own voice over and over.) He was snagged for the volunteer project through a friend-of-a-friend situation, where he was able to parlay prior radio station experience. Initially, Futrell would record various phrases, like departmental or course title information, into a cassette recorder. As technology progressed, the recordings were directly done with computers and generally took less than an hour a year to update.

Put down your pitchforks because it wasn’t Futrell slaughtering the pronunciation of students’ names. That was a computer recording.

In a recent trip to Washington, D.C., Futrell caused a stir while visiting with Sen. David Vitter. Several of Vitter’s aides were LSU attendees and recognized Futrell’s voice as REGGIE. “I don’t know of anything I’ve ever done that has brought me so much attention with so little effort,” Futrell said. Every student’s personal hell of registration may be getting smoother with time, but it’ll never be as backwardly amusing as REGGIE.