But, hey, I'm a supermodel, so it's all okay
I think the Gods of Academia are frowning upon the Z house, and, at this point, are just toying with its adult occupants.
I logged into the university's registration system yesterday to get us signed up for our last MBA class. Yay! We're on the downhill stretch! All we need is BUSN 6200. Only, here's what I found for the six BUSN 6200 classes:
Closed
Closed
Closed
Closed
Closed
Closed
Uhhhhh. I hyperventilated, used a defibrillator on myself and just generally freaked out. I started a frantic e-mail to our academic advisor as visions of extending school to 2010 despite our best efforts to cram it all into 2009 danced in my head. Then I thought, "Oh, f*** it." and picked up the phone. "Hello, registrar's office? Hi. I'm panicking right now. I need only one more class for my MBA and all the sections are full for that class and I really, really need to get in because it's the last class and I want to be done and I want my life back and get to see my family again and not stress out every night and stay up too late working on homework and I absolutely cannot extend this any longer because I really need to just be done..."
The lovely registrar lady was a calm voice of reason, a beacon of sanity on the other end of the line. After taking my name and student number, she commented, "Wow, you have really done the MBA program fast." Which resulted in another avalanche of words about how yes, I had done it fast which is why I really needed this last class so I could just be done already. She said, "No problem. I can squeeze you into section QN." The heavens opened and the sun shone through and a choir of angels sang.
"Oh, thank you thank you thank you! Um, can you squeeze my husband in, too?"
So we're both in, registered for our last class, although we're not in the same section. M whined about that for a bit until I essentially told him to shove a sock in it because we're lucky we're in the damn classes at all.
Crisis #1 averted.
We were scheduled to take our second exam in IT Management last night. Deadline was midnight...no problems. We had 40 minutes to complete a 30-question multiple-guess exam. Cool. First one went okay. We had studied...we were ready.
Only the on-line system wasn't ready. Well, shit. Kinda hard to take a test when one can't get into the test (or any part of the system) to begin with. M called the university's help desk and they started a trouble ticket, but they couldn't tell us when the system would come back up. We sent an e-mail to our prof, alerting him to the fact that we were trying to take the test but couldn't log in, just in case. Always good to show effort.
After awhile, the system came back up. Rock on. We logged in and started the exam. Around Question #10 everything started to slow waaaaaay down. This is not good on a timed exam. It's not good when it takes the test 45 seconds to save your answer and show you the next question, especially when it took you only 10 seconds to read and answer it to begin with. I began to sweat. I was popping through the questions quickly as they came up, but it was taking forever for them to show. At Question #16, the entire system locked up. I had hit the "Save and Show Next Question" button when it stalled. So I hit it again. I kept getting a line of red text, "Saving Question 16..." Over and over and over. I tried skipping to another question without saving. Nothing. I tried logging out. Nothing. Essentially, the computer sat and mocked me; the only thing moving on the screen was the timer for the test, tick tick ticking down as I sat powerless to do anything.
That's when I started hearing the stream of expletives float up from downstairs, where M was taking his exam. We hollered back and forth and then I heard footsteps pounding up the stairs and the expletives get louder. He ran in and checked the herd of blinking boxes that reside behind my Mac and give us magical Internet access everywhere in the house (when they're, you know, actually working). He rebooted the modem, and did a few other things that I don't understand.
He ran up and down those stairs about 12 times, trying to get us back up and running. At this point, I sat back in my chair and thought, "Huh, I should check that voicemail someone left just as things started to bog down with the system." We ignore the phones when we're taking timed tests, for obvious reasons. So I picked up the phone and punched the buttons to access voicemail.
"Hello, this is [unintelligible]. [More garbled speaking] Ann S********* [garbled] fell and is declining EMS. She does need assistance, so please [garbled]. If you have any questions please call us at [phone number given so rapidly that I had to listen twice] and reference case number [again with the litany of numbers]."
Holy f***. That's M's grandma's Lifeline service.
"Hey, babe? Yeah, we gotta go!"
Ditched the computer and test and modem and ethernet and ran out the door. Zozer was at M's folks so we didn't have to worry about her, thankfully. We met the EMS crew at Grandma's house (after going through the phone chain and getting voicemails everywhere, the protocol is for the service to alert EMS, which is appropriate since none of us have a medical background and I'd call 9-1-1 upon arrival anyway as I'd be afraid of inflicting more harm) and got her in bed and settled.
We returned home to restored Internet access and a timed-out test, showing congratulations, you successfully completed exactly half your exam, sucker. We could access the test, but since it had timed out we were not able to finish it. We answered the questions anyway, writing our choices on paper (the good old fashioned way), and then typed up e-mails to our prof explaining the night and begging for mercy.
Haven't heard back from him yet, but given the fact that, before last night anyway, I'm carrying a 100% and M's got a 99.9%, I'm hoping he takes us at our word.
So that was last night.
This morning, as I'm dropping Zozer off at school, one of the other moms stops me in the hallway. "Oh, hey, I've been meaning to tell you...we were messing around on the Internet the other day and a picture of Heidi Klum came up. Jackson pointed to it and said, "That's Zoe's mom!"
Okay, so the kid is 4 and apparently blind, but with that one sentence all the garbage from yesterday was erased. I've gotten Reba McEntire before, and local news anchor Deanne Lane, but Heidi Klum? She's tall and blonde and gorgeous and her hair is long and flowy and does that modelly thing where it always looks like it's blowing softly in the breeze whereas I'm, well, not any of those things. I dunno, maybe at some point Heidi had purple hair, or maybe she went two years straight with little sleep and dark circles under her eyes and a raging desire to run over malfunctioning laptops and burn overpriced textbooks, but even that'd be a stretch.
Whatever. I'll take it. Little Jackson is now my favorite friend in Zoe's class. God bless that little boy and his warped vision.
I logged into the university's registration system yesterday to get us signed up for our last MBA class. Yay! We're on the downhill stretch! All we need is BUSN 6200. Only, here's what I found for the six BUSN 6200 classes:
Closed
Closed
Closed
Closed
Closed
Closed
Uhhhhh. I hyperventilated, used a defibrillator on myself and just generally freaked out. I started a frantic e-mail to our academic advisor as visions of extending school to 2010 despite our best efforts to cram it all into 2009 danced in my head. Then I thought, "Oh, f*** it." and picked up the phone. "Hello, registrar's office? Hi. I'm panicking right now. I need only one more class for my MBA and all the sections are full for that class and I really, really need to get in because it's the last class and I want to be done and I want my life back and get to see my family again and not stress out every night and stay up too late working on homework and I absolutely cannot extend this any longer because I really need to just be done..."
The lovely registrar lady was a calm voice of reason, a beacon of sanity on the other end of the line. After taking my name and student number, she commented, "Wow, you have really done the MBA program fast." Which resulted in another avalanche of words about how yes, I had done it fast which is why I really needed this last class so I could just be done already. She said, "No problem. I can squeeze you into section QN." The heavens opened and the sun shone through and a choir of angels sang.
"Oh, thank you thank you thank you! Um, can you squeeze my husband in, too?"
So we're both in, registered for our last class, although we're not in the same section. M whined about that for a bit until I essentially told him to shove a sock in it because we're lucky we're in the damn classes at all.
Crisis #1 averted.
We were scheduled to take our second exam in IT Management last night. Deadline was midnight...no problems. We had 40 minutes to complete a 30-question multiple-guess exam. Cool. First one went okay. We had studied...we were ready.
Only the on-line system wasn't ready. Well, shit. Kinda hard to take a test when one can't get into the test (or any part of the system) to begin with. M called the university's help desk and they started a trouble ticket, but they couldn't tell us when the system would come back up. We sent an e-mail to our prof, alerting him to the fact that we were trying to take the test but couldn't log in, just in case. Always good to show effort.
After awhile, the system came back up. Rock on. We logged in and started the exam. Around Question #10 everything started to slow waaaaaay down. This is not good on a timed exam. It's not good when it takes the test 45 seconds to save your answer and show you the next question, especially when it took you only 10 seconds to read and answer it to begin with. I began to sweat. I was popping through the questions quickly as they came up, but it was taking forever for them to show. At Question #16, the entire system locked up. I had hit the "Save and Show Next Question" button when it stalled. So I hit it again. I kept getting a line of red text, "Saving Question 16..." Over and over and over. I tried skipping to another question without saving. Nothing. I tried logging out. Nothing. Essentially, the computer sat and mocked me; the only thing moving on the screen was the timer for the test, tick tick ticking down as I sat powerless to do anything.
That's when I started hearing the stream of expletives float up from downstairs, where M was taking his exam. We hollered back and forth and then I heard footsteps pounding up the stairs and the expletives get louder. He ran in and checked the herd of blinking boxes that reside behind my Mac and give us magical Internet access everywhere in the house (when they're, you know, actually working). He rebooted the modem, and did a few other things that I don't understand.
He ran up and down those stairs about 12 times, trying to get us back up and running. At this point, I sat back in my chair and thought, "Huh, I should check that voicemail someone left just as things started to bog down with the system." We ignore the phones when we're taking timed tests, for obvious reasons. So I picked up the phone and punched the buttons to access voicemail.
"Hello, this is [unintelligible]. [More garbled speaking] Ann S********* [garbled] fell and is declining EMS. She does need assistance, so please [garbled]. If you have any questions please call us at [phone number given so rapidly that I had to listen twice] and reference case number [again with the litany of numbers]."
Holy f***. That's M's grandma's Lifeline service.
"Hey, babe? Yeah, we gotta go!"
Ditched the computer and test and modem and ethernet and ran out the door. Zozer was at M's folks so we didn't have to worry about her, thankfully. We met the EMS crew at Grandma's house (after going through the phone chain and getting voicemails everywhere, the protocol is for the service to alert EMS, which is appropriate since none of us have a medical background and I'd call 9-1-1 upon arrival anyway as I'd be afraid of inflicting more harm) and got her in bed and settled.
We returned home to restored Internet access and a timed-out test, showing congratulations, you successfully completed exactly half your exam, sucker. We could access the test, but since it had timed out we were not able to finish it. We answered the questions anyway, writing our choices on paper (the good old fashioned way), and then typed up e-mails to our prof explaining the night and begging for mercy.
Haven't heard back from him yet, but given the fact that, before last night anyway, I'm carrying a 100% and M's got a 99.9%, I'm hoping he takes us at our word.
So that was last night.
This morning, as I'm dropping Zozer off at school, one of the other moms stops me in the hallway. "Oh, hey, I've been meaning to tell you...we were messing around on the Internet the other day and a picture of Heidi Klum came up. Jackson pointed to it and said, "That's Zoe's mom!"
Okay, so the kid is 4 and apparently blind, but with that one sentence all the garbage from yesterday was erased. I've gotten Reba McEntire before, and local news anchor Deanne Lane, but Heidi Klum? She's tall and blonde and gorgeous and her hair is long and flowy and does that modelly thing where it always looks like it's blowing softly in the breeze whereas I'm, well, not any of those things. I dunno, maybe at some point Heidi had purple hair, or maybe she went two years straight with little sleep and dark circles under her eyes and a raging desire to run over malfunctioning laptops and burn overpriced textbooks, but even that'd be a stretch.
Whatever. I'll take it. Little Jackson is now my favorite friend in Zoe's class. God bless that little boy and his warped vision.
posted by Amy at 8:01 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home