Face Off

This fellow was heading up the bridges. I don't know if he was in the Fringe or just insane.

Embra College starts back on Wednesday. 

I'm already getting a sinking sensation in my stomach. There certainly hasn't been any improvement in their organisational ability over the Summer. Let me elucidate the inner machinations of down market higher education in the modern era.

Yesterday morning at 11am, I received an email telling me I needed to report to the Sighthill Campus at 3pm the following day to enrol. So 28 whole hours notice. I don't know exactly what fantasy land the college administration lives in, were they think that's a suitable amount of time for people with, oh I dunno, silly things like lives, jobs, families... to rearrange their timetable. 

A lot of classmates couldn't make it. Those of us that could were greeted with the usual off hand disinterest and told to wait for someone to come for us. They funnelled us into a classroom upstairs. In previous years, staff members have filled out forms and taken details. This year, ever anxious to save a buck, Embra college has set up a self enrolment system. Simply fill out the form on a computer and hit submit. 

Now this would actually have been a good idea, if it was not for a couple of drawbacks.

Firstly (as predicted before we even hit a key) when you hit the submit button, the college computer system simply throws an error message at you. Then there follows half an hour of college administrative staff looking faintly embarrassed while we wait for someone to reboot the system. 

The second drawback with this, would be that surely if you're going to set up self service enrolment, the MIND BENDINGLY OBVIOUS THING TO DO, would be to allow people to enrol from home. On their computer. Rather than dragging them all the way to Sighthill for no bloody reason. But no. That would be far to forward thinking for these jokers.

Then I made the mistake of trying to enquire after my equipment store deposit from the previous year. 

Last year I went all the way from my house to the college, based on my tutors saying "you can collect the money now". When I got there, the woman at the cash desk (speaking in a manner normally reserved for very small children), told me that I couldn't have it. When I asked why I had been told otherwise, I got something to the effect of "NOBODY TOLD ME THIS WAS HAPPENING, ITS HARDLY MY FAULT!".

Silly me. Imagine expecting the cash desk to have all the money that didn't belong to them ready to hand back over. 

This year, I asked if I could just roll the deposit on to the new year, to make things easier. 

She said no. 

I asked if she could just refund it instead. At which point she asked for the slip of paper the store manager had given me at the end of May. which I haven't seen since May to be honest. 

I explained this. 

Surely, I ask, you must have a record on computer of my deposit and the fact that it was never paid back. 

Yes she replied. 

So can you check that record and refund me? 

No she replied.

Instead I was told, I needed to go back to the Store and ask him to Email her. She would then check her records and see if I had been refunded. 

If I hadn't been refunded (according to the record she couldn't just check when I asked her), she would email him back and tell him to issue me another slip for a refund. 

Which I could then bring to her. 

Then she would refund me. 

Finally and ONLY after this ridiculous box dance of bureaucratic idiocy, she would allow me to put down a deposit so I could use the store this year.

I was seeing white spots in front of my eyes at this point. Studying this course is not cheap and I'm not getting funding for it. The fact the the vast majority of the administrative staff at the college speak to you like you are some type of excrement on their shoe, can be quite hard to take. 

Now what is particularly galling about all this, is I went to Telford College from 1999-2001. It was exactly the same back then. The Tutors seem to spend as much time battling Bureaucratic stupidity as they do actually teaching. There are some fantastic Tutors in Embra college. It's just a shame the people running it are total clowns.