I am not a homicidal maniac.
But I swear, in my weaker moments at Rutgers, I would be cruising through the parking lot, and I’d see one of those meter maids out there with his dumb-ass badge and his pad of tickets, and I’d think to myself, “There’s nobody here. It’s just me and him. All I have to do is jerk the steering wheel to the right, swerve into him, and mash him up into that Ford Taurus he’s about to write up.”
No one would know. No one would miss him. But then, of course, another one would just spawn from the oozing sludge he left behind. I never did kill a parking attendant at Rutgers, but I might have been a folk hero if I had.
I wish this were a tangent. I wish that parking tickets had less of a defining role in my experiences at college. Problem is, Parking and Transportation Services was the most efficiently run department in the entire university. It was as if all of the school’s resources had been dedicated to punishing scofflaw parkers, and the manpower and resources left for meaningful academic assistance, quality control, and psychological counseling had been utterly depleted.
No department was as well organized as Parking and Transportation. The school couldn’t issue you a schedule without two overlapping classes. It couldn’t approve your financial aid without losing your paperwork. It couldn’t print your transcript without accidentally faxing your medical records to the student listserv. But if your meter had expired twenty seconds ago, you could be damn sure that a parking attendant was already writing your ticket out nineteen seconds ago. Such graceful efficiency.
Rutgers is big, old, and unfriendly. It’s like going to school in Dick Cheney.
Rutgers is also, like most colleges, a business. And that’s fine and important. But colleges are a special kind of business. It’s not simply that some colleges are structured more like corporations than like places of learning. It’s that many colleges are shitty businesses that don’t give a crap about customer service or quality assurance. They function like your conglomerated cable providers and your giant cell phone carriers and all those other companies that happily take your business but also let you know in no uncertain terms that you need them more than they need you. And when a whole oligarchy of these shitty businesses gets together and agrees to keep prices prohibitively high, classes vastly impersonal, and opportunities for entrance locked into a universally streamlined admissions process, the result is a college experience not unlike a five-year afternoon at the DMV.
Rutgers University treated its students like it didn’t really need their loyalty or affection. Those who gave it freely must have found what they were looking for at the sprawling, ghetto-bound school. I can’t speak to everybody’s experience there. And quite honestly, some of my friends even reflect warmly and nostalgically upon their time there.
But those who had difficulty finding what they were looking for—and I would count myself among them—experienced Rutgers as a preview for a callous, indifferent, infuriating, and inconsiderate world. Surveys suggest that this inhospitable quality is a constant presence.
According to the Princeton Review, which surveys students from 373 college campuses, in 2010 Rutgers ranked eleventh for “Least Beautiful Campus.” Just down the turnpike a shade, New Jersey Institute of Technology was tops in that category. In response to the prompt “Are Your Instructors Good Teachers?” Rutgers got the ninth-lowest marks. NJIT got the seventh-lowest. In the category of “Financial Aid Not So Great,” Rutgers ranked third, just behind Penn State and two spots ahead of Villanova.
Rutgers ranked eleventh in the category of “Class Discussions Rare.” And in a list of 373 colleges, only the University of Toronto ranked worse than Rutgers in terms of the accessibility of professors. So according to the Princeton Review, the professors at Rutgers had the worst office hours of any professors in America.
Of course, I didn’t know any of this when I signed up to go there. And it probably wouldn’t have mattered if somebody had told me. I was a resident of New Jersey, and it was the only school I could afford that wouldn’t have been considered a huge sociological embarrassment given my academic abilities and my 98th percentile SAT scores. As per the advice of my high school guidance counselor, I applied to five schools. I got into three. I had the financial means for only one. And I knew it all along. The admissions process was a charade, so I despondently resisted doing any real research on the subject.
All I really knew was that community college would have meant another year living with my parents. At the time, I’d have robbed a convenience store and turned myself in to the cops just to get out of their house. And so, I was New Brunswick–bound.
For the cost of tuition, room, and board, Rutgers delivers you into the brutal clutches of its bureaucracy and never lets go. Once your check is cashed, they bend you over and start thrusting, and they tell you you’ll have to fill this form out in triplicate and submit it through the proper channels just for the reach-around.
They have this really cute thing at Rutgers University called the RU Screw. They probably have it at other colleges as well. It’s like a syndrome, a catchall diagnosis for any number of things that are likely to go wrong over the course of one’s time at the school owing to the incompetence, negligence, and bureaucratic inefficiency of the university and its personnel, as well as their very genuine indifference toward the student body. I spent more time at college trying to repair scheduling errors, attempting to navigate the endless maze of automated phone systems, standing in lines, filling out forms, haggling with Student Services, and wishing I had simply studied abroad than I did on my schoolwork and my binge drinking combined (and they usually were combined).
Even if I’d wanted to be a diligent student, even if my classes had been compelling, it would have been this way. This college, which I still pay for every single month, was a straight scam, the fourth-largest university in the nation at the time and boasting the leanest staff of administrative personnel this side of the American embassy in Samoa. At a discount price compared to many other universities but a total rip-off when you compared it to something you could actually use, my Rutgers education came with a major caveat to the emptor: You are on your own.
Hence, the RU Screw. This is every symptom of a sick system; every consequence of designing an institution of learning to function like a multinational business; every demonstration of the university’s commitment to its corporate sponsors at the expense of its student body; every bit of evidence that the educational goals of the school are secondary to its vitality as a firm. As a client of any type of business, you would like to think that you’d stand up to such shabby treatment, that you’d be indignant, that you’d be all, “I don’t have to take this crap.”
But with colleges, you really do have to take this crap. As much as you’re paying for the experience, it is you—not the college—who is constantly being evaluated. Say you buy a vacuum cleaner from Sears and take it home, and instead of vacuuming, it sends a power surge through your house and blows up all of your kitchen appliances. Suddenly, this shitty vacuum cleaner has cost you a ton of money. So you bring the vacuum cleaner back to Sears to complain. While you’re waiting in line, a customer service representative walks up to you with a report card and says, “Based on what we’ve seen from you during your limited time in the store among several thousand other customers, we think you’re a C– shopper.”
“But what about my defective vacuum cleaner?” you ask.
To which your customer service representative replies, “There’s nothing wrong with the vacuum cleaner. You’re just too stupid to know how to use it. By the way, we misplaced your original payment on the vacuum cleaner, and your account with us is now delinquent. You’ll be hearing from our attorneys.”
It’s ludicrous to think that as a customer, you would stand for such an arrangement. But such is the nature of the RU Screw, except that your vacuum cleaner costs somewhere between twenty-four and thirty-six thousand dollars per year, and you’ll be paying for it until your Social Security benefits kick in.
Now, I’ve spent a number of years distancing myself from the day-to-day, bang-your-head-against-a-brick-wall frustration of being a student at this type of institution. So I thought it’d be fun, like a trip down memory lane, to call over to my old friends at Rutgers Parking and Transportation.
I push a few buttons to get through to the Parking Department. Somebody answers and immediately asks me to hold.
“Sure thing,” I say.
A female robot voice says, “Thank you for holding. Somebody will be with you in just a moment.” Cue the Muzak. Synthetic beats farmed from the opening credits of a motivational film and a jazz flute like Ron Burgundy with a frontal lobotomy.
The sound triggers something terrible and evil inside of me.
I’m tumbling into a well of bad memories the way that a motorcycle backfiring in the distance might take a guy back to ’Nam. I can see a younger version of myself flailing his arms and wantonly spewing profanities in tremors of apoplectic fury, knowing that ol’ Charlie Rutgers has gotten the drop on him again.
I remember in an instant the absolute misery that was the school’s matrix of automated phone services, understaffed offices, and disgruntled employees.
Now a male robot voice comes on.
“We appreciate your patience while holding. Please continue to hold for just a moment longer so that your call can receive the time and attention it deserves.”
The first smooth-jazz abomination fades out, and another one comes in. This one has more of a 1980s-porn-soundtrack feel, with a backbeat that seems almost to thrust over the top of the lead synthesizer and a bass line that just kind of hangs there like a botched boob job.
This whole thing feels really familiar.
I used to skip classes, clear my schedule, and stock the house up with food as if a nor’easter were approaching anytime I had to accomplish something that would require administrative assistance. Nobody in any of Rutgers’s offices of Academic Affairs, Student Services, Financial Aid, or Resident Life wanted to be there, and only a fraction of the staff seemed to know their job function…unless that function was to create a maddening hedge maze of bureaucracy where nothing was ever accomplished and absurdity lurked at every bend. If that was the function, the personnel at Rutgers were as utterly brilliant, and as temperamental, as trained seals. Through a workforce of button pushers that could outbitter you on the day that your puppy died, Rutgers University found every way possible to separate the student from his dollars without giving him the recourse to defend himself.
I suffered lost documentation, registration holds, course-credit snafus, and sudden new expenses. I watched my classmates endure disappearing professors, unexplained course de-registrations, and prerequisite lockouts. Putting aside the school’s accidental inefficiencies, I could not, for the life of me, figure out why Rutgers was so damn mean.
The female robot voice comes back on.
“We apologize for the delay. Please stay on the line. We will be with you very shortly.”
They say that the purpose of Muzak is to provide an innocuous and inoffensive soundtrack that uses lowest common denominator science to achieve universal accessibility. It functions as background noise that doesn’t cause you to think too hard about anything of meaning when you’re fondling produce in the grocery store, minding your own business in an elevator, or eating in the food court at the mall.
But when it’s piping directly into your earhole, it has a whole other purpose. It is designed to piss you off and make you hang up the phone. Four and a half minutes have passed.
The male voice comes back on.
“Thank you for your patience. You will be assisted momentarily. Please stay on the line.”
Now I realize that the male and female robots are alternating. They’re in on it together. And they’re so wretchedly polite.
Another minute and she comes back on.
“Please hold so that your call may receive the time and attention it deserves. Please stay on the line.”
It has only been five and a half minutes, and I’m seething anew with long-buried hatred for my archnemesis. I begin to remember the literally thousands of dollars that they took from me. I’m glad this is all coming back to me. I’m calling to find out what they did with all my money.
According to an article in the Rutgers University student-run newspaper the Daily Targum, as of 2006, Rutgers was grappling with roughly $3 million in unpaid parking tickets. And in the year 2005, the school had collected $1.3 million in paid parking fines. But things never seemed to get better. Everything was a Kafkaesque exercise in the ridiculous.
There were never new parking spaces. Commuters desperately circled the lots of New Brunswick in search of a place to stow the car before the start of class, sometimes finding none and returning home with no education to speak of for the day.
There were never enough buses. The class periods were close together and the campuses far apart. In the middle of a weekday afternoon, when people were mashed together on an intercampus bus like it was the last transport out of Saigon, you got the feeling that nobody but you really gave a shit about what happened to you and your little education.
It was hard to shake the feeling that they were plotting against you, that this was all part of some absurd conspiracy designed to waylay you on your path to mere adequacy, that your mission was to somehow obtain an education in spite of their best efforts to stand in your way.
No one was better at this than Parking and Transportation.
The people who worked there were a special breed. Among heartless bureaucratic soldiers, these were the Green Berets. They were taught to have rhinoceros skin, to breathe hate cloaked in onions. They were indoctrinated by self-flagellating monks to feel not the twinge of remorse, to know not the ache of compassion, and to fear not the wrath of our indignation. They were trained in tiger cages, poked with cattle prods, told that they were as replaceable as their own undergarments, and forced to listen to Celine Dion on full blast until they actually liked it. By the time we came to them angry and defeated, they were carved from stone. We were nothing to them but a source of revenue.
To be sure, the school prioritized Parking and Trans above education, as though the reason we were there was to defy all laws of physics by parking matter where no space existed. According to the university’s current website, “Unpaid tickets and late fees”—a crime of which I was guilty on any occasion when I chose to spend money on food and toilet paper instead—”will result in a university hold barring students from”:
Class registration
New parking permits
Receiving grades
Receiving transcripts
Permit refunds—ticket and late fee amounts will be deducted
Graduation
So, pretty much everything. The successful completion of your education depends on whether or not you’ve paid your parking tickets. I want to know why this is.
Seven minutes on the phone.
The robot guy tells me, “Your call is very important to us. You will be assisted as soon as possible. Please continue to hold.”
My mind starts to wander. I wonder how close the robot man and woman are. Are they friends? More than friends? Do they share a loveless marriage and a few bratty robot children? Whatever the status of their personal relationship, they’re a great tag team. Between the two of them and the smooth jazz, it only takes seven and a half minutes before I start to think about hanging up, eight and a half before I start to think about killing myself, and nine before I start to think about killing somebody else. I wish I had outgrown these feelings, but… I had a bad experience.
Why should the school so aggressively victimize its own students? Is the financial situation at Rutgers so dire that it has no choice but to carry out this aboveboard form of extortion.
Gimme all your money or the transcript gets it!
Well, it seems that every year, Rutgers stands before the New Jersey Legislature with its hat in its hands, begging for more public assistance. The poor public educational institution, the victim of cold governmental indifference, Princeton’s talent-deprived neighbor.
Well, maybe there’s something to that. According to an investigative report conducted by the Bloomberg News website in 2011, the History Department at Rutgers is so cash-strapped that its professors were forced to surrender their desk phones in 2009. The move was designed to save the school twenty-one thousand dollars annually.
Bloomberg reports that the History Department also shrank its doctoral program by 25 percent. The department has cut the number of Ph.D. candidates that it can field annually down to between twelve and fourteen, from sixteen to eighteen.
And with the recession worsening, leading to budget crunches at the state level, the university was forced to place a freeze on professor salaries. Professors were also instructed that they should give fewer tests to save money on photocopies. Professors were told in an e-mail in December 2010 that they could be billed personally for failing to cut down on photocopies. And professors are now being asked to pay for access to electronic journals that, until this point, they have had at their disposal for free. (It bears noting, here, that some of the paper-writing companies for which I have worked provide their contractors with access to such journals free of charge.)
According to the Bloomberg article, “state funding for Rutgers in the three fiscal years ending in June 2012 fell $29 million, or 10 percent, to $262 million… Tuition and mandatory fees jumped 7.3 percent over the same period to $12,755 for state students. The 2,800-member faculty hasn’t received a raise since January 2010, according to Patrick Nowlan, executive director of the professors’ union.”1
With some professors departing for better-paying work, academic resources have become yet scarcer. In my experience, the school’s overcrowding was apparent at every turn, with stuffed lecture halls and students getting turned away from classes at registration. So as I wait on the phone for a human being, I consider that Rutgers may have financial imperatives for the way it behaves. Maybe it’s not just a crappy heartless corporation. Maybe it’s a victim of the times.
“Thank you for holding. We appreciate your patience. Somebody will be with you in just a moment.”
Eleven minutes.
So it would appear that Rutgers is struggling. It would be surprising to find out, then, that Rutgers is tops among all state universities in providing financial subsidies for its athletics programs.
What?
That doesn’t sound right. The same Rutgers that’s always asking its professors to tighten their belts? The same Rutgers that’s always forcing its students to make sacrifices for the greater good? The same Rutgers that continues to inherit the catastrophic financial problems of its parent state? That Rutgers? That can’t be right.
Let me check it again.
According to Bloomberg, “at Rutgers, of the $26.9 million given to subsidize athletics in fiscal 2010, $18.4 million came from university coffers, top among state schools in the Atlantic Coast, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and Southeastern Conferences.
“The other $8.4 million came from student fees, where Rutgers ranks fifth.”
In a totally unrelated matter, Rutgers University raised its tuition fees by 8.5 percent in 2008 and proposed another 3.6 percent increase in the summer of 2011.
According to Newark’s Star-Ledger, Rutgers has spent more than $115 million in university subsidies and student fees on athletics since 2006. The Star Ledger identifies this amount as the “highest of any public school and nearly twice the subsidy of the next highest college among the power conferences.”
The recently departed1 Rutgers football coach Greg Schiano, who amassed a 68–67 record across eleven seasons with the university, made $2.03 million after bonuses in 2010, when the average salary was $142,000 for full-time professors, $96,000 for associate professors, and $49,000 for non-tenure-track instructors, according to the professors’ union.2 This is to say nothing of the forgiveness of $100,000 in home loans that the university gifts to the coach annually. The school also pays $500 a month for women’s basketball coach Vivian Stringer’s recreational golfing activities.
According to the Bloomberg article, Rutgers Athletics reported a net operational loss of $2.2 million in 2010.
Now, I’m a sporting gent. I enjoy a spirited match. I appreciate a good competition. But this just strikes me as a shitty business model, the kind that deprives the university of personnel for simple functions like helping new students register for classes or helping returning students develop independent studies… or… or answering the fucking phone at fucking Parking and Transportation!
“We appreciate your patience while holding. Please continue to hold for just a little longer so that your call receives the time and attention it deserves.”
“Answer the fucking phone!” I shout into the dark Muzakal nothingness.
“Thank you for holding. Please stay on the line. We will be with you very shortly.”
Twelve and a half minutes and, suddenly, a human being on the other end.
“Hello.” She already sounds pissed off. She’s pissed.
“Hi. I’m conducting an independent study, and I’m hoping you can help me out. I just have a few questions about revenue from Parking and Transportation.”
“Mm-hmm. Hold, please.”
“Ummm.”
Back to the robot lady.
“We appreciate your patience. Please be assured that your call will receive the time and attention it deserves when we return to the line.”
The human being comes back after five minutes and offers me an e-mail address, one of those generic administrative e-mail addresses with an abbreviated job title but no name.
“Is there a name of somebody that I might address it to?”
“No. But e-mail that address and it will get to the right person.”
Of course. I had forgotten. It was a rule of thumb at Rutgers that you never got anything done in fewer than three tries. And if you couldn’t get it done in three, you’d never get it done and that was that. I took down the e-mail address along with her assurance that somebody would actually respond to me.
I wrote the following e-mail:
To Whom It May Concern:
I’m a Rutgers Alumnus and I’m conducting an independent study for a book about the costs of college for today’s student. I was hoping that you could answer a few basic questions about Parking and Transportation policies and revenues at the university. Please provide me with whatever information is available. Your assistance is most appreciated.
I thank you in advance for your prompt and thoughtful responses.
Thanks so much and I will look forward to hearing from you.
Very Truly Yours,
Dave Tomar
What is your position/title at Rutgers Parking and Transportation?
What are some of the projects that the revenues collected from parking tickets are used for at the university?
Could you tell me about some specific projects conducted or completed using parking ticket revenue? Please include dates, project costs and any other details that might be relevant.
How much revenue has PATS [Parking and Transportation Services] collected from paid parking tickets for each of the following years?
2009?
2008?
2007?
2006?
2005?
What are some of the projects that the revenues collected from university-issued parking permits are used for at the university?
How much revenue has PATS collected from student/faculty-purchased parking permits for each of the following years?
2010?
2009?
2008?
2007?
2006?
2005?
How many employees does PATS employ?
In years past, it was possible to negotiate a reduced settlement of large balances in unpaid fines. Recent investigation indicates this is no longer true. Has this reduced settlement policy changed and if so, why?
Student Facebook pages report consistent incidences of “double-ticketing” or even “triple-ticketing,” in which students have received multiple tickets simultaneously for a single offense such as an expired meter. What is PATS’ policy on double-ticketing and triple-ticketing?
Thanks again for your thoughtful responses.
Three days later, I followed up, forwarding my original e-mail and adding this message:
At your nearest opportunity, please reply to confirm that you have received this correspondence.
Thanks so much,
Dave Tomar
I was surprised to receive the following message within the hour:
Dave Tomar,
This has been received but we are in our busy season already so this will take a little while to get back to you. You have requested a lot of information that is not readily available.
Sincerely,
[name excised] AICP/PP–Director
Rutgers University–Dept. of Transportation Services
Administration and Public Safety Division
55 Commercial Avenue, New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Well, some of the information is readily available, anyway. Here are the revenues and revenue increases produced by Rutgers Parking and Transportation Services as presented in the university’s 2010 annual financial report:
There’s not a lot of context here. We don’t know, because they wouldn’t tell me, how much money the school spends on making parking available, or how that figure compares to its budget for anything else. All I can really do with this information is observe that $7 million is a fuckload of money and that, for some reason that I’m sure has nothing to do with the school’s alleged financial problems, students were victimized by Parking and Transportation at a rate that increased by 23.9 percent between 2005 and the end of 2009. Have students simply become more irresponsible with their cars, or is there a concerted initiative on the part of PATS to increase the school’s revenues by fleecing its students? According to the 2010 financial report, the university recorded a revenue from parking that was $1,927,000 greater than that reported for the collection of loan payments from students and employees.
Now I had even more questions for the AICP/PP–director.
I replied immediately.
Mr. [name excised]
Thanks so much for your reply. Any information that you are able to locate would be most appreciated. Can I expect that you will be my primary contact for this?
I will await a response at your convenience.
Dave
Technically, that was my third attempt. I’ll let you know when I hear from them.
I never got any answers when I was there. Why should it be any different now? I should have my head examined for even attempting to jump back into it. I made it out in four years, which at Rutgers is like getting out early for good behavior.
That is because there is a pattern at Rutgers that is perhaps even more insidious than the bureaucratic misery, the constant administrative bungling, and even the parking gestapo. This is the unabashed lie that Rutgers is a “four-year college.” I was a communication major for one reason and one reason only: It cost less. As soon as I realized I was getting ripped off at my college, I did everything in my power to graduate as fast as possible without spending an extra cent. I sat down with my adviser in my sophomore year, and course by course we laid out everything that I would need to do to graduate on time. And I did it. No summer courses, no winter-break courses, and four years on the nose. I was one of the lucky ones, and in a shrinking minority, both at Rutgers and elsewhere.
A 2009 article in USA Today quoted the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute as reporting that “nationally, four-year colleges graduated an average of just 53% of entering students within six years, and ‘rates below 50%, 40% and even 30% are distressingly easy to find.’ ”3
I think I know why this happens. And it is no accident.
At Rutgers, you never knew what it was going to be. But you knew that at any given moment, the RU Screw could swoop in and derail your progress.
The kinds of technicalities exemplifying the RU Screw were amazing and rampant during my time at Rutgers, and they often overshadowed the simple need to focus on one’s studies.
The school was huge and seemed to have fairly modest standards for the types of students that it would admit. But try getting into a class that you desperately needed to stay on track in your major, and suddenly it was like trying to sneak into a country club through the service entrance.
And really, I hate to sound paranoid, but I’ll never forget this moment.
I had finally done it. I was graduating. I had two more finals to go, but my grades were all pretty solid. My credits were all in order. I had already RSVP’d a xerox of my butt to the graduation party committee. Time to go.
Then I got a phone call from a woman at the Office of the Registrar.
“Is this David Tomar?”
Oh crap.
“Yes.”
“Hi. David. We’ve been reviewing your file…”
“Yeah? And?”
“Yes. We’ve been reviewing your file, and though you are slated to graduate, it appears that you are three credits shy of completion of your major.”
“Bullcrap! I have 123 credits!”
“Yes. I understand that, but you are three credits shy of completion of your communication major.”
“Impossible! That’s not possible!”
“Mr. Tomar, there’s no need to shout!”
“Absolutely there’s a need to shout! Don’t tell me, two days before I graduate, that I’m three credits shy! I’ve been following the same course agenda for three years. I made it with my adviser. I did everything I was supposed to do, and I never failed a class!”
“What it appears happened, if you’ll just calm down, what it appears has happened is that one of the required 300-level courses in your major was moved to a different course category, so that one of the humanities that you took no longer counts as a humanities prerequisite. So you’ll need to review the course catalog and pick an appropriate course to compensate.”
“The hell I will! You call me now? Right now? And you tell me that a course I took two years ago, in the time since I completed it, is no longer a prerequisite in my major? And you think that makes sense? You think that’s OK?”
“Don’t worry. You’ll still be allowed to walk in graduation. You’ll just need to take this course during a summer session.”
“Allowed? I graduated. It’s my right, lady. There’s no way, there’s no way this is for real! Where were you two years ago? Forget that. This can’t even be legal. You can’t retroactively change that shit up on me and come at me looking for more money. If you want more of my money, go talk to the people at Parking. They’ve got all of it. But this is crap, and I will call a lawyer if I have to.”
“Sir. There’s no reason to lose your temper.”
“Oh, it’s lost. After all the crap I’ve put up with at this school, I’m finally done. And I did everything I had to. I will not be screwed by this university again. You have no right. How can you call me up like this, not even apologize, and start telling me that I have to put my whole life on hold because of a clerical error?”
“Well, sir, you can just review the course catalog…”
“Don’t tell me to review the catalog. You review it. Review a law book. You can’t do this to me. I mean, what is this?”
“Pardon?”
“I mean, what the hell is this? Is this a conspiracy? Are you conspiring to keep me from graduating? Is this a scam?” I know I sounded paranoid, but I couldn’t think of any other explanation. I was yelling and spitting, and I figured I probably sounded pretty crazy. But I couldn’t help it. I kept going. “Answer me! What are you trying to do to me? Is-this-a-scam!?”
“Hmm. I’m so sorry. It appears that we made a mistake.”
“Huh?”
“Yes. Actually, I’m looking now, and we have made a mistake. Your credits will all apply to your major.”
“So, wait. So, now I am going to graduate?”
“Yes. Everything is in order. Sorry for the confusion. Thank you for your time.”
Click.
I was mystified. It wouldn’t even be the last clerical error of the school’s that I dealt with. I didn’t go to graduation, so they actually sent me the wrong degree in the mail. I called and told them, and they just issued me another one. Now I have two. If I’d had any doubts before, now I knew for sure that it really was just a piece of paper, an insanely expensive piece of paper. Still, if anybody asks, I’m a double major. Believe me, I’ve earned it.