Rant-o-Rama
It's been a while since my last rant. So it's time.
There's this policy at the School of Ed that the only restrooms on the first floor are closed because the preschool wants it that way. This has made me angry for about ten months. I pretty much fume every time I walk by the little preschool on my way upstairs or downstairs, becuase nobody can go into the first floor, main floor restroom. Here is why I get so angry, bullet-point style:
- The preschool is not always in session, and yet, the first floor bathroom is ALWAYS closed.
- The preschool, which is this state of the art facility nicer than most people's apartments, has its own bathrooms built into it. The reason that they closed the restrooms isn't so that the kiddies can use it, it's so that nobody walks by and disturbs their day or causes any safety concerns. Give me a break. They have about fifteen million adults milling around there all day. Nobody's getting stolen. If not because of the insane supervision, at least because if you've ever been around the kids that go to this preschool, you'll see that you wouldn't even want any of them.
- And last, and most annoying, last I checked, people paid $40,000 to attend a university here at BU. None of these little four year old wonders are paying $40,000, and yet, they have control of the first floor! I cannot believe that nobody has done anything, even though everyone's complained. I'm going to start calling these little rodents "sir" and "ma'am" when I see them, just to get the point across.
My fuming has little effect. I saw this when the following conversation took place, which inspired this rant:
I had decided to take the polite approach and just ask if I could use the first floor restroom, since the preschool wasn't in session at the moment and I was first floor staff.
"Oh no," said the woman in charge of the building, "it's for the preschool."
"Right," I said. I realized, as I continued, that I just wasn't backing down. I'd had ENOUGH. "The thing is, the preschool's not in session right now."
"Well, there's a bathroom on the second floor."
"Yeah, but there's one right down the hall, like ten feet from here."
"It's for the preschool."
"Which isn't in session."
"It's still for the preschool."
"So, even though there's a perfectly good restroom on the main floor of the building ten feet away, and there's not a four year old in the building right now, the bathroom is still closed, so people have to go two flights up?"
"There might be a four year old in the building, we don't know that."
"Okay, you win."
There are about a billion things I would have rather said to her, all with multiple expletives, but I didn't say them and I won't write them because my dad reads this now and he'd probably have a huge fit if I wrote any swears about anybody in this. So that's it. But the point is, these people are all morons.
The thing is, my job today is to figure out who has proven that he or she should be able to come into the country for grad school. I was pretty surprised when my boss told me that's my job today, because that seems like something that should require some expertise in some sort of financial area, but apparently not. I'm not sure how comfortable little Jin Yan out in the Philippinnes would feel when she realizes that in between figuring out whether she can come into the country, I'm writing a rant. I wouldn't feel too good. I mean hey, if I'm in a bad mood, maybe Miss Yan can hold off for another year until she finds a bank statement in a different color ink, for all I care. When I said, "Okay, you win," to that woman, it took all of my restraint not to add, "but Jin Yan's not coming over!" Not that she would have gotten the joke, but I don't need anyone asking any questions.
Back to my dad for a minute. He's a lawyer and always thinking about how I can get in trouble for everything, so obviously the above is a joke. I don't really make big decisions about whether an international student has proven his or her financial worth and can be admitted to the country and the school.
Wait, actually, I do.
But I don't make the decision based on my mood.
I do, however, make the decision in between rant paragraphs, which may explain two things: why the rant is rather choppy, and b., why it's been a good fifteen minutes between clearing Jin Yan and Lin Yin.
Names, of course, have been changed, but honestly, I bet that somewhere in my stack there's at least one Jin Yan and Lin Yin.
While I'm ranting, I would also like to take this opportunity to rant about my move to my new room a few nights ago. I've been living out of a box for the past three weeks, with piles of clothes on my bed designating "clean," "passable," "negotiable," and "definitely not clean," which makes me pretty upset every single morning when I have to face my life. So, I was finally ready to move into my permanent (and by permanent, I mean two-month) room, and I got all my crap packed up and into a cart, and then I went to my new room. My anger level at having to move all the time was pretty steady at "furious," without much change.
That all changed when I saw my new quarters. First, I saw that the losers before me had put up contact paper all over the place. This wouldn't bother me except that the contact paper didn't match and it was a horrendous pale yellow checkerboard pattern on one side with a bright yellow sunflower pattern on the opposite side. Whoever thought that either paper would add anything except more ugly to the room is out of her mind. My annoyance at the ugliness was forgotten when I looked down and saw that there was a huge carpet discoloration, followed by a bunch of random crap that nobody had bothered to vacuum. I looked around and realized that this room hadn't been cleaned probably since the Yankees last won a world series (DIG!) and this made my anger level skyrocket to absolutely seething. I would have thrown my flip flop except I was too nervous that my barefoot would land on my disgusting floor. It's a pretty sad scene when you don't want to unpack your garbage can because you're afraid of what it might touch on the carpet in your room.
My room situation would make me angry enough, but then I had this whole water fiasco. I spent about fifteen minutes looking for enough change to buy two waters, one for me and one for my friend. When I finally found enough change, I saw that the water machine was off, so I walked all the way across the floor to the other water machine and put in my $1.25, only to find that the machine ate the money and gave me no water, so in the end, for $2.50 and unfathomable amounts of aggravation, I got one bottle of fake flavored water from the only machine that was working, and by the night's end, I was arguably catatonic.
And you know what? I'm not done yet. Last week, the waitress didn't bring water to our table even though we asked her at least fifteen times and water's the easiest thing to ask for in a restaurant. The mailroom lost my mail twice this week and told me it was my fault. At a store on Newbury Street, the woman didn't understand the concept of online ordering - NEWBURY STREET! Tom Cruise is driving me insane with his antics and telling everyone that he's the source of all wisdom; I missed the "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" Red Sox edition even though I had it marked on my calendar (leave me alone); the dining hall ran out of soft serve vanilla frozen yogurt on the hottest day of the year so far; some woman just called me to ask how to rush her application even though she hasn't applied or taken the GREs or MATs and doesn't want to in the next month; the Red Sox haven't been consistent, Manny hasn't been hitting, Francona's been making questionable decisions, and the bullpen makes me want to shoot myself.
And, the bullshit continues, because today I was in line at lunch and two people cut us. One person at least had the decency to look over apologetically with that stupid pigshit half-smile like, "Sorry I'm an asshole" but the other person just looked straight ahead as though she had no idea where she was until the sandwich person magically asked, "Can I help you?" and then she knew EXACTLY where she was and what she wanted. I didn't even care that I was staring right at her. Staring isn't even the right word. I was openly glaring. And you know what kills me the most about all this? This type of person doesn't even care that you're glaring. And really, when it comes down to it, who really does care that you're glaring? So what, I'm glaring at her. She's got her sandwich and she didn't have to wait and I'm the one stuck standing there, just glaring like a total loser.
You know, those elementary kids really had something when they basically blackballed any kid who cut in line. If you were fat or stupid or even ugly, you could still have friends. But if you smelled or if you cut in line, you were alone. And you know what, that's really how it should be.
See, if I thought that that stupid preschool was teaching their kids these types of important things, I wouldn't mind going around them and upstairs and downstairs. But they're not and so I do and that's just how it is.
There's this policy at the School of Ed that the only restrooms on the first floor are closed because the preschool wants it that way. This has made me angry for about ten months. I pretty much fume every time I walk by the little preschool on my way upstairs or downstairs, becuase nobody can go into the first floor, main floor restroom. Here is why I get so angry, bullet-point style:
- The preschool is not always in session, and yet, the first floor bathroom is ALWAYS closed.
- The preschool, which is this state of the art facility nicer than most people's apartments, has its own bathrooms built into it. The reason that they closed the restrooms isn't so that the kiddies can use it, it's so that nobody walks by and disturbs their day or causes any safety concerns. Give me a break. They have about fifteen million adults milling around there all day. Nobody's getting stolen. If not because of the insane supervision, at least because if you've ever been around the kids that go to this preschool, you'll see that you wouldn't even want any of them.
- And last, and most annoying, last I checked, people paid $40,000 to attend a university here at BU. None of these little four year old wonders are paying $40,000, and yet, they have control of the first floor! I cannot believe that nobody has done anything, even though everyone's complained. I'm going to start calling these little rodents "sir" and "ma'am" when I see them, just to get the point across.
My fuming has little effect. I saw this when the following conversation took place, which inspired this rant:
I had decided to take the polite approach and just ask if I could use the first floor restroom, since the preschool wasn't in session at the moment and I was first floor staff.
"Oh no," said the woman in charge of the building, "it's for the preschool."
"Right," I said. I realized, as I continued, that I just wasn't backing down. I'd had ENOUGH. "The thing is, the preschool's not in session right now."
"Well, there's a bathroom on the second floor."
"Yeah, but there's one right down the hall, like ten feet from here."
"It's for the preschool."
"Which isn't in session."
"It's still for the preschool."
"So, even though there's a perfectly good restroom on the main floor of the building ten feet away, and there's not a four year old in the building right now, the bathroom is still closed, so people have to go two flights up?"
"There might be a four year old in the building, we don't know that."
"Okay, you win."
There are about a billion things I would have rather said to her, all with multiple expletives, but I didn't say them and I won't write them because my dad reads this now and he'd probably have a huge fit if I wrote any swears about anybody in this. So that's it. But the point is, these people are all morons.
The thing is, my job today is to figure out who has proven that he or she should be able to come into the country for grad school. I was pretty surprised when my boss told me that's my job today, because that seems like something that should require some expertise in some sort of financial area, but apparently not. I'm not sure how comfortable little Jin Yan out in the Philippinnes would feel when she realizes that in between figuring out whether she can come into the country, I'm writing a rant. I wouldn't feel too good. I mean hey, if I'm in a bad mood, maybe Miss Yan can hold off for another year until she finds a bank statement in a different color ink, for all I care. When I said, "Okay, you win," to that woman, it took all of my restraint not to add, "but Jin Yan's not coming over!" Not that she would have gotten the joke, but I don't need anyone asking any questions.
Back to my dad for a minute. He's a lawyer and always thinking about how I can get in trouble for everything, so obviously the above is a joke. I don't really make big decisions about whether an international student has proven his or her financial worth and can be admitted to the country and the school.
Wait, actually, I do.
But I don't make the decision based on my mood.
I do, however, make the decision in between rant paragraphs, which may explain two things: why the rant is rather choppy, and b., why it's been a good fifteen minutes between clearing Jin Yan and Lin Yin.
Names, of course, have been changed, but honestly, I bet that somewhere in my stack there's at least one Jin Yan and Lin Yin.
While I'm ranting, I would also like to take this opportunity to rant about my move to my new room a few nights ago. I've been living out of a box for the past three weeks, with piles of clothes on my bed designating "clean," "passable," "negotiable," and "definitely not clean," which makes me pretty upset every single morning when I have to face my life. So, I was finally ready to move into my permanent (and by permanent, I mean two-month) room, and I got all my crap packed up and into a cart, and then I went to my new room. My anger level at having to move all the time was pretty steady at "furious," without much change.
That all changed when I saw my new quarters. First, I saw that the losers before me had put up contact paper all over the place. This wouldn't bother me except that the contact paper didn't match and it was a horrendous pale yellow checkerboard pattern on one side with a bright yellow sunflower pattern on the opposite side. Whoever thought that either paper would add anything except more ugly to the room is out of her mind. My annoyance at the ugliness was forgotten when I looked down and saw that there was a huge carpet discoloration, followed by a bunch of random crap that nobody had bothered to vacuum. I looked around and realized that this room hadn't been cleaned probably since the Yankees last won a world series (DIG!) and this made my anger level skyrocket to absolutely seething. I would have thrown my flip flop except I was too nervous that my barefoot would land on my disgusting floor. It's a pretty sad scene when you don't want to unpack your garbage can because you're afraid of what it might touch on the carpet in your room.
My room situation would make me angry enough, but then I had this whole water fiasco. I spent about fifteen minutes looking for enough change to buy two waters, one for me and one for my friend. When I finally found enough change, I saw that the water machine was off, so I walked all the way across the floor to the other water machine and put in my $1.25, only to find that the machine ate the money and gave me no water, so in the end, for $2.50 and unfathomable amounts of aggravation, I got one bottle of fake flavored water from the only machine that was working, and by the night's end, I was arguably catatonic.
And you know what? I'm not done yet. Last week, the waitress didn't bring water to our table even though we asked her at least fifteen times and water's the easiest thing to ask for in a restaurant. The mailroom lost my mail twice this week and told me it was my fault. At a store on Newbury Street, the woman didn't understand the concept of online ordering - NEWBURY STREET! Tom Cruise is driving me insane with his antics and telling everyone that he's the source of all wisdom; I missed the "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" Red Sox edition even though I had it marked on my calendar (leave me alone); the dining hall ran out of soft serve vanilla frozen yogurt on the hottest day of the year so far; some woman just called me to ask how to rush her application even though she hasn't applied or taken the GREs or MATs and doesn't want to in the next month; the Red Sox haven't been consistent, Manny hasn't been hitting, Francona's been making questionable decisions, and the bullpen makes me want to shoot myself.
And, the bullshit continues, because today I was in line at lunch and two people cut us. One person at least had the decency to look over apologetically with that stupid pigshit half-smile like, "Sorry I'm an asshole" but the other person just looked straight ahead as though she had no idea where she was until the sandwich person magically asked, "Can I help you?" and then she knew EXACTLY where she was and what she wanted. I didn't even care that I was staring right at her. Staring isn't even the right word. I was openly glaring. And you know what kills me the most about all this? This type of person doesn't even care that you're glaring. And really, when it comes down to it, who really does care that you're glaring? So what, I'm glaring at her. She's got her sandwich and she didn't have to wait and I'm the one stuck standing there, just glaring like a total loser.
You know, those elementary kids really had something when they basically blackballed any kid who cut in line. If you were fat or stupid or even ugly, you could still have friends. But if you smelled or if you cut in line, you were alone. And you know what, that's really how it should be.
See, if I thought that that stupid preschool was teaching their kids these types of important things, I wouldn't mind going around them and upstairs and downstairs. But they're not and so I do and that's just how it is.
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