10/04/2005 04:52:00 PM|||James O'Malley|||

Despite Universtity being shiny, new, and exciting, and full of things to do, it's still obvious that it's an educational institution.

It's not the lecture theatres, text books or group of youths smoking outside that give it away- it's the fact that trying to get anything organisational or beaurocratic done is near impossible. You'd think that issuing a timetable and allocating a seminar group to all of the new students who enrolled at the same time would be easy- all of the data is in one place so it'd simply be a case of saying "mail merge this, SQL that, print everything". But this is a place of learning. Nothing is that simple- so I'm without a timetable, seminar group or clue about where to be at what times.

If I even bother to go into Leicester tommorrow, it'll be at a time of my choosing, as I will quite literally have no idea when to be there.

Once again I've been let down by the people who make such a fuss about being able to offer help and guidance. The guy on the phone has essentially said, "yeah, I'll sort that out for you. Whatever. Leave me alone. It's not really my job to be helpful!". (It was).

This isn't the first time something like this has happend- educational officials are rubbish. Now, I'm not talking about teachers- they're usually excellent. The exception here being the supply teacher who gave me a detention for doing the work set in year 8.

But anyway, I was in year 10 or 11- which for any Americans reading, is when I was 15 or 16. I'd imagine you American readers also read it with me having a quaint English accent, or at least a cockney.

As I was one of the "better" students, who would have been in the clever people club, if my form teacher had passed on the message about the meetings, (grumble, grumble), I was asked to take part in something called the "World Challenge Day".

I think it was run by the gap year company "World Challenge", and was essentially a day of team building activities, like "construct something from these planks of wood that can have everyone sitting on it, raised above the ground" to the ever-popular "obtain objects from the opposite side of the hall, without touching the floor, using these objects". It was especially exciting as us main-schoolers didn't have to wear school uniform.

As it turned out, some of the people, despite being intellectually superior to their peers, decided to use the occasion to muck about and show up the school. This might be libel, but I'm sure I've got memories of my good friend JD rolling someone along in a few tyres.

Next day, one of the senior staff members called everyone into a room for a bollocking. After having a good rant, she told a few people to stay behind, as they'd been the worst offenders. Perhaps the rant was just to mask the identity parade that was taking place? After leaving, I thought nothing of it.

It was only a couple of days later when my parents recieved a letter in the post that was essentially bitching about how awful I really am. When my dad leaned against the sofa, sitting on the arm, at 7:30am, and casually saying "so what happend on the world challenge day, then?", I knew something was up.

After a short discussion, a letter had been written to the school, demanding an apology for the injustice- we reckoned that one of the people who actually were mucking about gave my name instead of theres.

My point is, we demanded an apology from the school, and in the end they just brushed it under the carpet, never using the word "sorry" for falsely accusing me. The closest I got was a senior staff member, who out of coincidence, was supply teaching my english lesson said, "Ooh, I need to have a word with you". She never did.

This clearly must have scarred me somewhat, to still be clearly embedded into my mind even now. DMU, let this be a warning to you! Don't muck up otherwise I'll be blogging about it in four years time, which will no doubt reflect badly on you!

|||112844593132797783|||Beaurocratic Incompetence