Fetch me a Porcupine and a Banana STAT!

 Rand Simberg links to this very good piece on 5 fallacies of happiness.
Read the whole thing. It tangentially segues into the content below the fold...which is just diary stuff.

About a month ago I learned that the difficulty I had in registering for Summer and Fall classes was NOT due to some unresolved debt. I was missing a pre-requisite. You see, I had taken freshman chemistry my freshman year. Unfortunately, in the intervening years, the course designations have changed a bit. Chem 115 is now required for science majors, not Chem 111. This means that I can't sign up for ANY of the upper level Oceanography courses I need until I take freshman chemistry...a two semester class...meaning in turn that I can only take the last 3-5 upper division classes AFTER next spring.
Fudge...
How, you may ask, was I able to take these 300 level courses? Well, this is such a subtle screw up that neither the adviser nor the computer caught it until this past semester, when the ODU registration computer finally noticed.

No doubt its ability to grasp such arcane issues is a sign that it is becoming self aware and will soon try to kill us all....but that that is of limited concern to me right now, because , as they say at the link above...

It Gets Worse.
The Oceanography department was sympathetic and I'm (mercifully) not loosing any of the courses I've taken the last few years. However, I do need to get this prerequisite out of the way.
This is an Evil University Bureaucrat thing not a College of Oceanography thing.
SO...
With next semester free of anything but Japanese and freshman chemistry, I decided to look into a double major, rather than a major and a minor. I've almost completed my minor, so if my graduation plans for spring are fuxxored, I figured I could at least look into making my Asian studies minor a full major. It seemed doable by filling out the vast empty spaces in my schedule over the fall and spring. So I sat down with the head of the Asian studies department and we went over my transcript...and that's when it got worse....

^{Art via}

You see chillllren....when I first went to ODU in 1989, I tested out of several classes. I got a 5 on the history AP test for instance. I also transferred in with about 25 credits from two semesters at a community college, because... you see...I am a cheap rat bastard.

Going over my transcript the Department Head began going over my Gen Ed courses. She pointed out that the courses that transferred were accepted in lieu of classes that don't exist any more. For example a community college class might be taken in place of History 117....'cept there is no Hist117 anymore and since the community college classes have been renamed too there's no real way to determine transferability. The Department head knew I had taken a lot of developmental courses and ought to be covered for most of them except perhaps a few new requirements.  She was was horrified at what the regulations said, so she sent me to see the adviser to the college of arts and letters and their head exploded. So they called in one of the grand Pooh-Bahs of the College of Arts and letters...and I ambled back to the history dept to get a course by course assessment of the history classes I CLEPd. There was much sympathy...but the changes and new rules are pretty heinous.

Not everything was lost, but the college won't recognize the AP credits nor several of the Gen Ed courses from the community college.

Preliminary tally..out of 120 credits needed I now have fer sure ( in theory) a mere 50...

Son of a biscuit eater...

On the upside...
*I'll soon have 56 (I'm taking summer classes). I have another 4 that will be an "A" or a "B" as I'm waiting on a grade from a capstone (!!) class I took last semester. That class was administered by the aforementioned department head who got called out of country before she finished grades.this will bring me to at least 60.

*A few of the "lost classes" may actually be counted in spite of the nasty paper pushing bureaucrats in the old administration building. For instance, I have an "A" in an Asian military history class that the school hasn't offered in 15 years and is not on the class list at all....but the head of the Department insists it ought to count.
*Aside from Japanese, next semester is going to be relatively easy as it will be full of 100 level classes....assuming I can get into those at this late date.
*As stupid and infuriating and un necessary as this is, it is one of those things that could have really bitten me on the ass as I prepared to graduate with a job lined up. If so it would have pushed my graduation back at the worst possible time, as it would have caused me to break a contract.

*While this is the latest of a series of gut punches and sets back my plans more than any of the 9 times I've had to drop out...though far less than those incidents have in aggregate. It is galling, infuriating and expensive, but it is not insurmountable. If I take full loads I'll be able to graduate in 4 semesters
^{(very unrealistically 3 as 20 credits x 3semesters =60 but 20 is a self destructive hell of a load)}

***That means graduating next December is theoretically doable.
*Unlike 10 percent of the US population I have a job.

The last little while I've thought long and hard about this. This has frankly knocked the wind out of my sails and me on my back.
I've thought about all the setbacks, and the lack of wisdom in throwing good money after bad.
If I'd just dropped out 15 years ago and gone driving full time at UPS, I'd be 5 years from retirement and in the catbird seat financially.

But I had a goal and pursued it like a retarded pitt bull with an Ahab complex.

Now I'm 39 and for the last few weeks I've been looking at the rickety trailer and sparse bank account that are the current results of this quixotic series of decisions. I have little hope of getting a return on my investment in comparison to what I would have made had I simply saved the tens of thousands of dollars I have sunk into this ever in this degree....let alone tripled my income by going driving. There is something to be said for not throwing good money after bad and not repeating mistakes...

However, 14-16 months and ~12 thousand dollars are a pittance compared to what I've wasted. To be that close and have nothing to show for it seems foolish. And yes I realize that this sounds like a prospector going farther into the desert because he KNOWS there is gold there..I've mulled this over for a while.
In spite of everything, my debt is near nil, so I'll have one added bonus to getting a degree....unlike most Of my schoolmates I'll have a degree, but no $40,000-$70,000 debt to go with it.
Wo0t.
I've made a lot of mistakes in my life, but I've come this far, and I'll be damned if I'm going to add "College Dropout" to my repertoire of fail..... I'm not on the last quarter anymore, but I'm at least halfway there, probably a bit more, I'm not going to give up now... I'm going to get the degree.

But Good Lord this was a gut punch.

Putting my self inflicted problems into stark perspective, Mom goes under the knife next Wednesday.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 07:47 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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