More Bureaucracy

sam­bear needs lov­ing not-sick thoughts. He has food poi­son­ing. He dragged him­self out of bed long enough to call UHaul to check on our reser­va­tion, and it’s a good thing he did—they thought we were com­ing to get a truck today. No, that was nev­er in the plan. He had to explain things to sev­en dif­fer­ent peo­ple before it was sup­pos­ed­ly set straight, and I stress the “sup­pos­ed­ly” there.

Why do pro­fes­sors hand you a print­ed copy of an assign­ment or oth­er mate­r­i­al, then read it out loud? I find it an annoy­ing waste of time. And I absolute­ly HATE it when any­one reads out loud to me unless it’s the kind of thing that is well-suit­ed to such deliv­ery and it’s done well. There is noth­ing on a syl­labus or most assign­ment sheets that falls into that cat­e­go­ry. In all my years of attend­ing vary­ing kinds of class­es, I’ve only had one teacher whose deliv­ery was worth lis­ten­ing to—Rosemarie Mason. The woman was incred­i­ble. She read “Sin­ners In the Hands of an Angry God” to our 9th-grade class and I’m cer­tain there were some con­ver­sions right then and there.

It feels a bit odd to be one of only two (I believe) tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tions majors in a tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tions class. It’s the very first one, which hap­pens to be required for every engineering/computer major, too. It is full of peo­ple who don’t seem to real­ly want to be there, many of them seniors who left it ’til last. I keep feel­ing like I talk too much. I don’t like group projects at any time, but I’m real­ly dread­ing them in this class.

Any­way, anoth­er day, anoth­er class, anoth­er bureau­crat­ic sna­fu. I got home and had a phone mes­sage from my advi­sor, who is a won­der­ful man. My name was on a list of stu­dents whose class­es would be dropped by the end of the day if tuition was­n’t paid. The tuition has­n’t been paid because of the finan­cial aid depart­men­t’s delays. The finan­cial aid direc­tor had promised me that she would per­son­al­ly make sure that my class­es were NOT dropped due to their delays. I still haven’t reached her, but I man­aged to speak with the assis­tant reg­is­trar and all is sup­pos­ed­ly well for the moment.

I called the fed­er­al stu­dent aid peo­ple since SPSU con­tin­ues to insist that the delay is there. Nope, they fin­ished every­thing on 4/23. I can’t get hold of any­one in the finan­cial aid office today—apparently, they do not com­mu­ni­cate with the out­side world on Thurs­days. They hide in the back offices, because they’re tech­ni­cal­ly there and not closed, but they don’t answer their phones and there’s nobody at the front desk.

Mer­cer faxed a copy of the course descrip­tion for my “inter­per­son­al com­mu­ni­ca­tions” course to SPSU. I’m hop­ing to use that and “life expe­ri­ence” to get cred­it for a “small group inter­ac­tions” course that’s required for tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tions majors at SPSU.

Agnes Scott has­n’t faxed descrip­tions of my math and Eng­lish cours­es yet because nobody can find any record of Math 109 ever exist­ing. Yes, it’s on my offi­cial tran­script from them. Yes, they have a grade of A for me for that course from a Pro­fes­sor Leslie, but they can’t find Math 109 in the cat­a­log for that year—or any oth­er. So the assis­tant reg­is­trar there is try­ing to find some­one in the math depart­ment who was there in 1984 to see if maybe they remem­ber some­thing or have a syl­labus hang­ing around in some for­got­ten drawer.

The math course was called “Pre­cal­cu­lus and Intro Cal­cu­lus I.” If I can get cred­it for Pre­cal­cu­lus for it, I’m done with math—unless I try to do a dual major with some­thing tech­ni­cal. The Eng­lish course was Eng­lish 102, but not the one most peo­ple assume that would be (basic com­po­si­tion class). It was an hon­ors com­po­si­tion and Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture course. I already have cred­it for the nor­mal Eng­lish 102 from Mer­cer Uni­ver­si­ty, so I’m hop­ing to get Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture cred­it for the ASC course. Real­ly, real­ly hoping.

The Ancient World His­to­ry pro­fes­sor reminds me so much of some­one from the local filk group that it’s very dis­tract­ing. I’m look­ing for­ward to that class, though it’s a lot of read­ing. In fact, if I can man­age it, I may take the Medieval World His­to­ry course just because I want to do it.

I did my first TCOM home­work assign­ment last night. We have anoth­er “real” assign­ment today, due next Wednesday—one of the sev­en that actu­al­ly make up the total grade for the course. I want to work on it instead of read­ing my his­to­ry text, but that’s a bad idea since his­to­ry class is tomor­row and that read­ing is due then.