Stupidity Hole

So instead of sitting here for another hour and thinking about starting writing soon, I decided that now would be the best time to take some sort of affirmative action and begin pounding away on my poor, embattled keyboard and string together the letters that form the words that lead to sentences that allow me to communicate through the mystical, elusive medium known as text, in order to talk about stuff.

Yes, I am wasting a little bit of time by writing something that probably won’t have any bearing on how this will turn out, but, to be honest, I don’t have any strong or witty rebuttal to that, so instead I’m going to request that you all pretend that I came up with one and are amazed by it, as well as my handsome ebullience.

Today is a day where I find myself beginning to lose faith in the ability of the university I attend and some of its staff to help in my path of learning, although, at the same time, I realise that I may be asking for a lot more than I probably am entitled to.

With assistance from some of the people who help run the courses I am currently enrolled in, I have been provided with contacts of people that can help further my interests in the sciences and of course, I have reached out to them to try and find more information to work out in what field I want to specialise.

I’ve also been provided the contact for someone who, whilst does not work in an area I am entirely interested in, is still someone that I could have assistance with in learning more about animal biology.

I’ve made the attempt to reach out to these contacts and had no response. I find that more frustrating and annoying than I probably should.

I understand that they have no obligation to speak to me or acknowledge my attempt to reach out to learn more.

At the same time, I feel that in their not responding, they have failed me as a student who is wanting to learn more about certain fields of science to work out what I want to get into specifically.

Maybe it’s because I’m an undergraduate. If that is the case, I still feel that I am, to an extent, deserving of some sort of acknowledgement of my interest in their fields of study as I imagine that the best thing to do when someone enquirers about your field of science, you should probably communicate with them as they are seeking you out on their time.

I don’t know how some people feel about that, but if someone is expressing a clear interest, it probably means that they have a genuine want to learn more and not fuck about with what they want to know.

I could be reading it the wrong way and it could just be down to being busy. At the same time, with no response, I don’t feel confident in their ability as people who work for the university and it leaves me feeling a little less able to respect them as my superiors.

Again, I have to admit that I could be asking for a lot more than I am entitled to.

There’s something else compounding on the fact that I feel that my university is letting me down.

Wait. There’s two other things.

The first is the minor runaround I had when requesting to do something that I won’t go into details about as there hasn’t been a conclusion as of yet.

Suffice to say, I was directed to the wrong area, then when I went to the “right” area, I was told something else as there doesn’t seem to be any real communication between departments on campus.

It’s a minor thing, but a bit of pointless traveling could have been saved if the correct thing had been told to me the first time.

Suffice to say, when I finally learned what the correct procedure was in order to request to do what I wanted to do, I expressed my frustration. I expressed it calmly, but I have to admit that the word “fuck” came up, which drew the attention of two other people near the person I was expressing my frustration to, who then stared at me.

This is something that angers me a fair bit.

I’m not going to jump the fucking counter. I’m not yelling. If you work in a place that seems to have a communication problem, that should not end up being my problem. Also, when I’m calmly expressing the fact that I know it’s not the fault of the area that I have ended up in and am not attacking them in the slightest, that might indicate that you don’t need to stand there and watch me.

If you weren’t there to try and control what may seem to be a situation that won’t get out of control, then why the fuck are you standing there?

I’m probably seeing the situation a bit differently to what it was.

The last thing that is leaving me with less faith is the general inadequacy of the ability of staff who work on the customer service line of my university.

In some ways, it’s amazingly bad. I don’t know who trains the people who work on it, but they need to learn that recommending a patronising, almost insulting attitude to queries is not something that should be had, ever.

I know that I’ve given my fair share of shitty customer service, but at least I didn’t actively set out to do such a thing.

It seems that most (if not all) of the people who man the phones do not care in the slightest about giving anything beyond sub-par customer service. You’re not just there to answer questions in an insulting manner; You’re there to assist.

These are probably minor issues, but I’m finding my faith in my university slowly disappearing.

The time it took to write one thousand words: 22:01:72

It’s been a while since I went for the mighty one thousand, which is probably why I wrote this so slowly. It probably doesn’t help that I’m trying to be vague (and possibly failing to do so).

Oh well. It’s here now. A bit of an angry, poorly-written polemic that adds very little (if anything) to a conversation that may not exist.

Probably reading the customer service bit incorrectly as well, but at the present moment, I can only go off what I have experienced.

DISCLAMER: The above post contains swearing. If you don’t like swearing, consider yourself warned.

Written at my university library.