Information Frustration

I've been on holiday for two months now, and during that time I've gotten my results for my BA undergrad finals (not too shabby) and obtained an Advanced Open Water SCUBA diving qualification. 

Behold, the Kathfish.

Woot. But that whole time, the lack of information from the Education department worried me. 

Even simple things like finding the term dates so that I could book my end of year flights was a mission, involving an email that got passed from person to person, up Kilimanjaro and back down again, round the corner to pick up some fish and chips and then off to Granny's house... until finally someone sent me a list. I then stuck the dates up in the Facebook group so that the other people could see them too. No one else was going to do it. 

This last one was the cherry on the cake... You see, the department sent out a letter saying "If you don't respond to this letter by the end of December, we'll give your spot in the course to someone else." It also, conveniently, contained the course dates they'd told me about in November. They sent this letter on December 20th. By international post. Mine didn't arrive at all - I heard about it (and was then forwarded a scanned version of it) from my friend and future classmate (the lovely author of Teacher Squeaks) and then I ran around the house screaming, dashing my head against the wall and ripping fistfuls of hair from my spinning head (which was on fire). 

No, not really.

What I really did was send a very polite, professional email to them saying "I have not received this letter but would like to confirm my spot in the course. Please could all future correspondence be via email." And that was that. Sure enough, a couple of days ago they sent out an email informing us that the unreasonable deadline had been extended, and that those of us who had contacted them could rest easy.

Phew. I must say, having to beg for information is a bit of a change from the lovely English department, which sends out letters saying "We see you did rather well on your exams. Well done! Here, have a cookie." 

Well, at least we get free tea and coffee in the mornings. If only I drank either of those.