Another brilliant display of incompetence.

Sorry, this one's going to be a rant.

For about four weeks, I've been emailing my French professor and trying to catch her before she scurries out of the classroom to set up a new time to take the final exam. (I'm leaving this godforsaken country--praise Allah and the seventy-two virgins--before it's scheduled to take place on July 9th.)

In the meantime, I've made plans. Like, oh, I don't know, A TRIP TO BERLIN.

I finally get an email back from her this morning going on and on about how we'd already decided (we? where is this we coming from?) to have the exam on June 19th, and it simply can't be changed. All with an undertone of "you just think you are SO entitled that you get to have an exam whenever the hell you want".

So it looks like I'm not going to Berlin. Think she'll reimburse me for my plane tickets?



This is honestly the final straw in my dealings with this university. Everything I have done or have tried to do while I've been here--getting papers signed, faxing things to my advisor at home, registering for classes, checking out books from the library, blah blah blah ad infinitum--has been frought and unnecessarily complicated and nobody wants to take any responsibility for what is, in essence, THEIR JOB.

For instance, some moron in the cogs of the BRILLIANT Dutch bureaucratic machine managed to screw up the date on my €500 residence permit. So I went to the International Office on Friday to see if someone could call the immigration office and triple-check that it'll be okay for me to leave the country in a couple weeks, despite this hopelessly bungled document.

The woman REFUSES to call. And I'm like, um, you know, I would do it myself, except for that little nagging fact that I DON'T SPEAK DUTCH. AND YOU WORK IN THE INTERNATIONAL OFFICE. SO YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT.

But her colleague handles those questions! And said colleague isn't in the office today! SHOCK! AWE!

So...could you call IND? Pretty please? With a cherry on top? No. Of course you couldn't. Because that would be Too. Friggin'. Simple.

So could I have your colleague's email address? Maybe a phone number?

Shock registers on her face. "Oh no, you'll have to come by the office."

Abortion providers may be getting murdered and state courts may be depriving gay men and women of their basic civil rights, but hey...in America, you can get a goddamn phone call made if you need a phone call made. Twenty-five days, ladies and gentlemen.