Recently I've been privileged enough to sign up for 29 credits at my local university, 15 for summer, 14 for fall. One class of those 29 credits is offered at an extension campus in an adjacent city. And as much as I hate driving to another city just to take one class, this class worked out best for my schedule. I'm not looking forward to it, but I'll just have to stick it out.So I'm looking at my tuition balance and I notice a $1,000 charge for this one particular off campus class. Wait what? “They're really going to charge me $1,000 for just one class? That must be a mistake." So I go back on campus and talk to a guy in the extensions office. He explains to me that there's no mistake on my account and that if I want to be charged a sane amount of money, I would need to email the people in charge of this stuff. All the meanwhile, he is being cynical and mocking me for not knowing what to do in the first place. Oh and the best part, by paying a sane amount of money, my registration was going to be put on hold. So I couldn't sign up for fall classes immediately, and if any of you are familiar with signing up college classes, then you know that if you don't sign up for classes asap, you’re not going to get the schedule you want.
At this point I'm annoyed and thinking, this guys a jerk, and I'm also thinking, this school knowingly charges students insane amounts of money for off campus classes, in which the only way to pay a fair amount is to send an email to some random dude in an office, AND your registration is put on hold for next semester! Ridiculous, but so is college.
Alright, so I go home, I send the email; I wait a day, and get a response. The response is no more than two sentences long, and was really unhelpful. So I send another email, again this time I am replied with just two sentences that say I need to go back in and talk to someone in the office.
At this point, I presumed that this meant to talk to someone in the office in order to register for next semester. That was my assumption and I was basing it off of just two short sentences that could be taken in any context. There wasn't much logic in this entire process to begin with, so I figured "that must be it".
Fast forward a couple weeks. To my surprise I am able to register normally and my tuition amount has not been adjusted one bit. So being both slightly annoyed and grateful for being able to register, I go back to the office that put me in this mess in the first place.
So here's where the story gets interesting and inspired this entire big long post. I approach the guy in the office (same guy I talked to a month ago), I explained to him the situation and that I had followed his instructions of emailing these other people. In the process of explaining my situation I said,"The emails were not very helpful and kind of shady,.. just one or two sentences long." Then within 10 seconds he pulls up all the emails I sent and reads them off to me....It turns out that the same person who had replied to my emails was the same person I was currently talking to and whom I had talked to a month ago. FYI, who would have thought that a guy at a desk had the power to instantly pull up every email I ever sent. INSANE!
So let me just back track for a second for clarification. I met this guy and he explained to me how being charged an arm and a leg was normal and that I should email someone else. Okay, got that. I send the emails and it turns out to be the EXACT SAME FRIGGIN GUY! THEN, he tells me to go back into the office, only to talk to the EXACT SAME FRIGGIN GUY! WTF! All I wanted was helpfulness and clarification, not a back and forth trip to gather bits and pieces of information. I'm bitter and I'm pissed off!
Okay, so now back to the conversation in the office. The guy I'm speaking to explains that he had not done any fee adjustments yet for any students. Apparently, there’s a magic date in which tuition becomes reasonable to pay, I just never got the memo.
A coworker sitting behind the guy immediately replies after hearing this conversation and says,”Shady eh?" Which provokes the man I'm speaking with to say, "well now I'm not sure if I even want to adjust your fees." Being flabbergasted and stunned by the situation, I stumbled over my words and apologized.
You should have seen this guy. His face looked as if I had offended his dead parents and disgraced his family honor. Admittedly, I should never have said "shady" and I feel bad about it. It really was just a poor choice of words. I'm not sure why I even said it, or why it popped into my head. Perhaps it was my total and utter bitterness towards the situation, but none the less, I regret saying that.
The point of this whole story? College pisses me off.... That’s about it. Thanks for reading!
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