Sunday, February 05, 2006

*Bangs Head Repeatedly Against Wall*

First, I would like to start off this post with some tension-releiving cusswords.

Fuck.

God fucking dammit.

God fucking Jesus fucking Christ.

For the luva fucking... fucking... FUCK.

God dammit.

God FREAKIN' dammit.

Dammit, dammit, dammit.

God DAMMIT all. Dammit all to Hell.

Okay, now that I've gotten that out of the way...

Before the end of last year, I went on-line and signed up for classes. Their system was a little different from last year, but it seemed intuitive enough. Or so I thought. I signed up for classes and confirmed my choices.

Or so I thought.

So then February 2006 rolls around, and my schedule hadn't arrived yet. In fact, I received nary a correspondance from my local college. My step-brother, on the other hand, has recieved three letters from them, probably junk. "How odd," I thought to myself, and wondered when they were going to send me my schedule. Thus, I waited until yesterday (Saturday, February 4, 2006) for it to arrive. Since they don't deliver mail on Sundays and classes start Monday, I waited until this morning to look my classes on-line so I can copy down the room numbers.

I logged in and clicked on the link that took me directly to my schedule.

The schedule was empty.

"What the Hell?" I thought. I figured it was just some odd nuance of the system. As classes hadn't actually started yet, perhaps the system didn't think I had an actual schedule yet. Thus, I poked around the site a bit to see where else I could find the classes I thought signed up for.

I clicked on my Course History.

It only went up to Fall 2005.

I checked my schedules for last Fall and Wintersession, thinking that maybe I had accidently signed up for the wrong semester.

I hadn't.

So, going for broke, I clicked on "Drop Classes," hoping to see a list of classes I signed up for. The classes I had chosen were all still listed there, with information on where to go at what time. There were two tables on the page. The one at top, labled as "Preferred Courses," had all the data and next to each course name was a drop down menu. In each drop-down menu were four options: The first was blank, the second was "Register," the third was "Remove from List," and the fourth was "Waitlist." The table below that was labeled "Current Registrations."

I was looking at a shopping cart.

For those of you woefully uninformed, an on-line shopping cart is not unlike a physical shopping cart. It allows you to go around an on-line store and keeps track of the items you wish to purchase until you either remove them from the cart or buy them all together. If you don't do anything with them, they just sit there forever. My college's on-line registration worked on the same principle.

Now, I'm pretty sure I didn't just throw the courses into the cart and expect the clerk to follow me out of the store with them. From my foggy recollection of what I did a couple months ago, what I believe happened was that I saw them on the list and assumed it was a list of classes I registered for, perhaps awaiting automatic processing in a queue. Or, maybe, I clicked the confirmation button at the bottom, expecting the default option to be "Register." There's no telling what bone-headed decision I made, but something tells me I just didn't look at the page hard enough. How was I supposed to know it wasn't going to register by default, other than actually looking at the drop-down list? Perhaps it's just victim mentality, but I think they could've made it a little more obvious.

Well, I suppose there are at least two good things about this major blunder:
1) The books I hadn't bought yet are the least of my worries.
2) I now have more time to look for a job.

Bad things:
1) Having to suffer the indignity of showing up for class to see if I can get an add slip for late registration...
2) ... Only to be turned away because the class is full. The creative writing class I signed up for, for example, has a waitlist to get on the waitlist.
3) In not having a class this semester, I'll need to re-enroll if I want to take one next semester.
4) I'll have to find a job.

All things considered, though, there was one major deception, though not an intentional one. See, when I signed up for classes I was also able to pay for them on-line. Also, when my college raises tuition fees they still expect me to pay the difference eventually. So when I payed for the classes I thought I signed up for, I was actually paying for last semester's classes. So when my credit card bill arrived with three hundred dollars going to my college, I figured those were for my current classes. Although, now that I think of it, at the time I did wonder how much of that went to pay for last semester.

Well, hopefully there'll be less ambiguity next semester, if there is one. This time, I'll know that there's a shopping cart when registering, and I'll be able to pay for rising tuition costs as soon as I know about them.

But now I wonder if it isn't too late to apply for the San Francisco Academy of Art College...

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