It’s about to get brutally ugly around here

I am still boiling with rage because of the incredible incompetence of these guys at the post office here at university. I’ve been waiting for my tickets for the flight home and for some important documents I need to open a bank account here in the UK (they not only charge you 5 quid every month for a bank account if you’re a student from abroad but they also create a whole new level of bureaucracy especially for this).

Those documents were sent with TNT, which allowed me to actually see on the online tracking page that the documents had already arrived here on November 16th, but everytime I went to check my post since then, I was told that there was none. I don’t know exactly what happened at home, but today my dad forwarded me a fax he got from TNT, with the signature of the guy here at university proving once and for all that the documents had arrived here on campus. So I printed it off, went to the post office and for some strange reason, I suddenly had tons of letters lying in my inbox – maybe the guy who was there all those times I went there before just didn’t know how ‘GCL56’ is spelt and told me there was no post only to get rid of me. Isn’t that great, finally a happy end. I even got my NHS card which got sent well over a month ago (on October 20th).

You don’t seriously believe that everything turned out to be alright, do you? Indeed, it wasn’t and still isn’t. Among those many letters was one from my tutor, telling me I had to come to his office on Monday at 12.30. That would be no problem, if it were next Monday, but it was this Monday November 27th! At this point I boiled over with rage. I don’t usually get angry, but if there is one bit of my character that changed during the last months, it certainly is the fact that I will never ever again excuse the slightest incompetence. This may seem harsh, but nobody is allowed to repeatedly make the same mistake without punishment – it’s not as if I screamed at those guys without a reason, I had been there to check my post three times in the last couple of days! To my own surprise, my anger was far worse than I had thought. I’d even say that I have never been that angry before in my entire life, when I was talking to one of the people in the office, I noticed that I even had trouble to prevent my voice from trembling. I explained my problem, and than got to talk to the Senior Duty Manager, who told me I should find out about when exactly my tutor sent that letter and file a written complaint so that the case can be investigated.

By the time I finally got to my room again and could email my dad that at least I finally got my tickets and the documents, it was half 5 – which meant I couldn’t go to the Adice Shop and ask for my tutor’s email address in order to contact him.

Demonstrating their incompetence to one of the few students who are able to present such an issue to staff at the very top of the university’s hierarchy might not have been their best idea.