Unhelpful

Today is the most magical day of the semester for any student at my college: Class registration day. Dozens of sweaty, smelly students packed into the shoebox-sized Records and Registration Office, desperately trying to get into classes marginally better than “Basketweaving 101″ and “Intermediate Jamaican Steel-drumming 253.”

Technically, we’re supposed to use TESS (the online registration server. It stands for something cute, I’m sure), and do it all via the Cyber-information highnetway of the future from the safety and comfort of our dorm. But not this semester.

You see, TESS uses cookies that expire approximately two nano-seconds after being issued. This means that the hundreds of students pounding the servers, trying to register, are constantly having their cookies timed out before they can register.

So, because of this cookie madness, I had to run around all morning and miss class (finally, a valid reason for missing class!).

I won’t include the gory details of my trip to one of the many campus computer labs, or my phone calls to the Registration office. They’re just not funny. But believe me, it ate up a lot of time.

Eventually, I was forced to endure an hour-30 line leading up to the final obstacle in my quest for registration: A woman who is somewhere around 80 millennia old with an advanced case of Alzheimers and serious hearing problems. She probably had arthritis, too, because it took her about 30 seconds per keypress.

Dialogue time!

Me: Okay, the call numbers for all the classes I want to take are written on this sheet of paper. *tries to hand her the paper*
Her: Oh, just read it to me.
Me: Okay… the first call number is 16606.
Her: Uhh… 16006?
Me: No, 16606.
Her: Oh, 16060?
Me: (getting annoyed) No, 16606.
Her: Okay, okay. 16660?
Me: *hands her the sheet* Just use this, please.
Her: No, no, keep reading!
Me: *continues to hold the sheet out to her, saying nothing*
Her: Just read the numbers.
Me: *rustles the sheet of paper a little*
Her: *hesitates for about 10 seconds, then takes the sheet*

The end result of this? I managed to get three out of five classes that I wanted. Of the two I didn’t get, one was totally full, and the other is totally full, but I have a class with the head of the department and I can ask her to fit me in.

On a related topic, I recently read The Big U by Neal Stephenson, and I found it to be a fairly accurate (albeit technologically dated) impression of modern universities. Read it.