Thursday, March 15th, 2012
FINALLY. I finally have a solution to my crisis with my
classes that was going on all this week. Monday was our registration day and I
woke up nice and early to log in and sign up for my classes. But wait. I never
received that email with my account information. It’s kind of hard to log in
without that…By 9:30 I was in “I’m not panicking yet, but I don’t really like
where this is going” mode until Angela told me the format of how to log into
our school’s site. Oh. Magically mine worked (there were many other students
that had received the email but nothing worked for them). 10 seconds later, I
had all my classes added and it was a grand time. I arrived to the university
with students in a panic. A lot of people had not had the same luck that I did
and weren’t registered and some classes were already full.
I was thinking everything was fine and dandy until I
realized by Thursday, two of my classes just weren’t going to cut it. I was at
the 6 class capacity, so I had to drop one anyway, but neither class pleased me
and I wanted to switch into the Latin American film class. I tried to make the
switch online, but suddenly, my user name and password were invalid. What? I
used this 3 days ago and didn’t make any account changes. How does that
happen?? NOOOO!!!! I need to get out of these classes and into the other one.
But it was not working.
Here’s the deal with technology in Argentina…I’m not saying
it’s bad, because they do have it and when it works, it works. But in a lot of
aspects, this type of technology is out of reach. We get it for cheap in the US
because we buy it from China. Argentina has much different import policies. So
it’s not that you can’t get the latest iPhone, it’s that it might be harder to
find and by god you are going to pay through your nose for it because it’s not
made in Argentina. The other side to technology here is the functionality of
it. Like I said, when it works, it works. But when it doesn’t, well, I hope you
weren’t trying to do anything important. Some technology is outdated,
untrustworthy or just downright temperament. And that’s the rub. Things can
stop entirely without warning and without remorse, but then start working with
just as little notice. The world keeps going, though. For this, Argentines are
incredibly flexible and creative in this sense.
After 4 visits to “the guy”, my account FINALLY worked.
Somehow I was in the system on Monday, then by Thursday, I was apparently not a
student at the university. Oh. Yeah. Ok, sure… Luckily, the film class I wanted
had 15 extra spots, so I didn’t have to be on a waiting list. The good part of
this whole debacle was that while initially I was very anxious and fearful that
I wouldn’t get my class or that the solution to this would be tedious, after
Monday, I just stopped caring. After
making my inquiry with the school and checking up on it, there was absolutely
nothing else I could do, so I hoped for the best, then just stopped caring. It
will work when it’s supposed to, if it’s supposed to I told myself. And guess
what—it did!
The only bad thing was that I realized I didn’t want to be
in the literature class after buying the $120 peso textbook for it and nobody
would buy it off me…If you’re interested in reading Foucault or 19th century
Spanish lit, let me know. I hate that I dropped the class for it being “too
hard”, but at the same time, do I want to read ~40 pages a week of advanced
text in Spanish? No. No I don’t. There’s a difference between challenging
yourself and resigning yourself to a semester of highlighting every other word
to look up on wordreference. This class would be difficult in English, too…
For more about my classes, however, see my other entry, “Description
of my classes”. Original, no?
No comments:
Post a Comment