Spartan Daily - Serving San Jose State University since 1934

Issue date: 1/31/08 Section: Opinion

Angelo Lanham

Ah, the good old Internal Revenue Service. No nonsense, these blokes. Warning letters, and after the time for those have come and gone, they pound down your door, take your things away and you end up two-to-a-cell with a large fellow named Tiny who's in for aggravated assault and has a battleship tattooed on his chest.

That's a nice, simple way of doing things. When you don't payeth enough, they taketh away, and put you in with Tiny.

To me, though, there should be a difference between the IRS and SJSU Admissions and Records, and currently, that divide seems to be evaporating.

Those countless poor souls with pipe dreams of getting their classes back, standing in DMV-style lines at the beloved 10th Street garage, have all my sympathy.

They didn't irresponsibly miss deadlines, nor did I. Put simply, we didn't pay in full.

Like them, I discovered the day before class that I had been dropped from everything.

The culprit: a $40 debt caused by a waitlist class that snuck through via auto-enroll while my computer was down.

I know that some sort of real world is supposed to be lurking around the corner, and that stuff like this is going to happen all the time, and the subsequent need for responsibility, but this seems a bit silly.

After last semester, I wiped away my last bead of sweat, enrolled in and paid for my classes on the Internet and hibernated until Jan. 22. I didn't think to keep a constant watch on my defunct computer and guard my paid classes.

The only snail mail I got was the obligatory SJSU "can't wait to see you again, here's your Eco Pass" letter.

At least bill collectors give harassing phone calls and mail, so you know what's going on before they take everything away.

Besides that, this is something like the fourth time I've been screwed by these people.

The transfer process in general was a maze of mirrors, littered with transcripts, 15-page online applications without a drop of intuition behind any of them.

And the lines. My god, the lines.

Even after you've become an official Spartan, you can still get screwed.

And yes, all the dates for registration are available online, but even if you write every date backwards on your forehead in permanent marker as a reminder, something will still go wrong, and you will still get screwed.

This isn't fair, and neither is life. There's a real world out there, you know.

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