Sorry sir, but that's the official PSU policy

When I first started writing this, I had just made it through the first week of Fall term.  Sort of.  I had successfully endured the passage of time, but I was buried in coursework. My financial aid was over 4 weeks late, and I was generally just having a really hard time transitioning back to college.  I think going from a month of near-constant socialization, with no real obligations aside from not burning down the house, to having lectures to attend and frequent, difficult coursework with looming deadlines is just generally a difficult transition to make.  Fortunately by now, my head is now slightly more in the game, because as I post this, I’m solidly in the middle of the term.  As in: Calc midterm was on monday, Circuit Analysis was today.  Hopefully they both went well. 

Financial aid:

After a long and ridiculous battle, they decided to pull their heads out of their asses and give me my loans, which had been withheld for over a month because of some new mystery form I was supposed to sign but had no knowledge of, since the financial aid office never told me about it.  They were quick to tell me that they told me about it, but they didn’t ever actually… tell me... about it.  

Now, I like a false accusation now and then as much as the next guy, but I really loved hearing the words “Oh, we sent you three emails about that.  This is your fault for not checking your email” from—and I swear I am not joking—every single person I spoke to at the financial aid office throughout this multi-week ordeal.  I get notifications on my phone for every email I receive and this was the first time I had heard about these, but being too nice for my own good, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and checked my pdx.edu account on their server (even if I delete the email from PSU from my personal email, it is all archived on this server.)  Unsurprisingly, there was nothing there.  So after that, I nearly had an aneurism every fucking time someone told me it was my fault for not checking my email.  DO NOT tell a computer engineering grad student that they didn’t check their email. 

Lab Switch:

Due to a clerical error on my part, I signed up for a Wednesday lab section for my circuit analysis class, instead of the Monday section that I can actually attend.   Oops.  No big deal though, right?  Wrong. 

At UO, I would have gone online and just switched sections, which would have taken a few minutes, tops.  PSU, however, operates in some kind of perpetual, last-century hell-world when it comes to delivering information though, so I would have needed to fill out a form by hand and fax it to them, or mimeograph it and tape it to an 8-track then deliver it on horseback.  As if that isn’t bad enough, it turns out I missed some arbitrary deadline, so I have submit a formal petition to an appeals tribunal.  That only meets on Tuesdays.  And I need formal statements from the professor and both lab instructors.  

I swear, I couldn’t even make this stuff up if I tried.   

Remember: we are talking about switching lab sections here.  No money is even changing hands.   Furthermore, I’m going to start flipping tables if it gets denied, since I couldn’t attend the Wednesday section even if I wanted to.  I am convinced that it is the official policy of PSU to intentionally waste student time until they eventually give up on whatever request they originally needed.   And I am not a fan.