Two shitty days.

I just had the shittiest two days in recent memory.

So, I'm taking an English course at Parkland. That, I though, was no big deal. Of course, I was incorrect. I was dropped from the class because I attempted to take this course twice before, and the college has a clause that warns the students and advisors when numerous attempts are made at the same class. Now, I am good at languages. Great, in fact. The reason I dropped the same course twice before was because my previous instructors were fruit-cakes. Literally. The last time I took this course, the English instructor spent the first five weeks refreshing the class on how to gather research materials. I understand if he wanted to refresh the class for one week; or, maybe even two weeks. But five weeks? Traipsing to the library to be told something I already know was annoying.

It started like this: I log on to the college site on Sunday so I can actually get information on how to do my first homework assignment, and I could not. The course that was supposed to be under the "course" heading on my student web page was empty. So, I still did the homework assignment from memory. On Monday, I go to class, and my (current) English instructor tells me to "read my student email." Oh great. I know something is wrong. So, I read my email, and, lo-and-behold, I had an email from some-higher-up that told me I was dropped from this course. I spent all day Monday and Tuesday getting myself re-inserted back into my summer course. I was not pleased.

I am still failing to see the logic in dropping someone, unwillingly, from a class, if they attempted that same class previously. Why is three the magic number? Why not four, or two? It is illogical to make a student run through additional bureaucratic loops just to make sure they "know that this is their last chance" to complete the class. Why would the school add to its already huge paperwork load to ensure I know this fact? I am dumbfounded.

However, that was not the worst thing that could have happened to me. While I am dancing like a fool to get myself re-inserted back into that course, I decided to act like I was still enrolled. So, I was doing my homework last night that was due today. It was near midnight, and I just saved my nearly-completed rough draft. Literally five seconds after that event, the hard drive in Kevin’s laptop shit the bed. I spent several hours listening to a recorded interview, and transporting the important elements into a typed memo document. Suddenly, it was gone. It was so weird...and infuriating. I saved the document, and then there was this weird rapid clicking noise, followed by a "zip-zip-zip" noise. Did I forget to mention I was infuriated?

I emailed my instructor the situation as it was happening. She told me to bring what I had. Of course, I only had what I saved to Google Documents, which wasn’t much. I slammed out as much as I could in the first hour of class. The second hour was the peer-review session. Since I only had two completed paragraphs (of a whole document that was chewed up and spit out by the laptop) I was a bit embarrassed for myself.

I’m better now. The project that was destroyed by the laptop is not due until Thursday. That gives me to "recover" what I lost, by memory, and have a completed document by then.

*sigh*

Technology sucks.