Murphy's Law

I received my very first traffic ticket (well, first real ticket, not the parking kind) sometime before last Thanksgiving. I'm pretty sure that when I got the ticket I really had stopped fully at the stop sign, but I realize there have been a million other times when I certainly have not....and I'm willing to bet there is a whole group of folks out there who would argue that I have never actually stopped at a stop sign once in my life. "California Roll"..... right? So I'm not horribly appalled at the idea of receiving this particular ticket. I did the traffic school (finally after having to ask for an extension of the due date. 100% correct on the test though...I am an awesome driver) and sent in the "bail money" (a.k.a. fine), decided to be more careful next time and completely forgot about the whole thing.

About a month later, I get a notice in the mail thanking me for the timely return of the bail money and completion of traffic school, however I have neglected to pay the "bribe money" (as I like to call it) which is a separate fee paid to the city in addition to the bail and the fee paid to the traffic school in order for the City of San Diego (America's Finest City, of course) to ALLOW you to take traffic school. The amount of this fee was apparently alluded to in the small print, which, surprise surprise, I hadn't seen. So I dutifully and without comment sent in the extra $28 for which I was asked.

Again I managed to forget about my ticket that I had gotten, two months ago at this point, when I get ANOTHER notice saying that the city never received this second payment and since it was overdue, I would be charged an extra $250 in late fees if not "remitted IMMEDIATELY." (I had also sent a check to Jolene at the same time and she never got hers either, so it must have been the mail carrier's fault.) This time I call into traffic court to pay my fee over the phone by credit card. Their phone hours are exactly those that I am at work as a receptionist and while I make every effort not to make personal calls during working hours, this was on the verge of a financial emergency. When I finally get up enough courage to call (my boss walks by my desk regularly all day). The conversation went something like this:

"I need to pay my bribe money...er, I mean balance of my traffic ticket."

"What is the due date on the violation?"

"It doesn't have a due date. It just says 'IMMEDIATELY on the due date line."

"What's the due date?"

"There isn't one, it's just 'IMMEDIATELY'."

"There's no due date? Are you sure?"

"Yep, just says 'IMMEDIATELY'."

"Ok, what is your card number?"

"1234-5678-9012-3456. Can you repeat that back?"

"5634-5904-2956-2563."

"No, that's comepletely wrong."

"What was your due date for the violation again?"

You get the idea.

The best part was that as I was talking, I also had also been leafing though a Mrs. Fields cookie catalogue that the office had been sent, don't ask me why. So my boss walks by, sees me looking at a cookie catalogue, on the phone with my credit card out. Obviously I was ordering cookies on company time. Rats.

ANOTHER MONTH LATER (see the pattern?), I get ANOTHER notice in the mail that my credit card had been declined owing to it being past the expiration date of the card. Enclosed was a confirmation of my card info with the correct number but the expiration date recorded as April 2003. Now, first of all my expiration date is in 2006, but much more importantly, if you are taking down the expiration date of a card and someone tells you that it is in 2003...wouldn't you immediately tell them that it OBVIOUSLY won't work instead of consciously writing down "April 2003" and just being ok with it? She never said anything to me about my card supposedly expiring in 2003. It was cool with her, I guess. So now I am no longer permitted to pay with a credit card owing to the fact that it is "expired", and must go into the court to pay my fine. The hours to pay fines end up to being 9:56-10:02 AM, but only on certain Tuesdays every other month during a full moon. Oh and since my card was declined, I will need to obtain a "cashier's check or money order only. No cash or personal checks will be accepted."

Now I'm mad.

And I am not often mad. But I am now. So I call them again. And demand that I be able to use my credit card that is NOT expired because there is no possible way while working full time to be able to drive over there. Again I must call from my desk at work. Remembering what happened last time, I made sure to have all catalogs of any kind completely put away. Turns out, I must have called on the BUSIEST DAY EVER IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD and the line was busy on my first ten attemps. Eventually I got through, but hung up the phone out of nervousness every time I imagined footsteps coming down the hallway, effectively sending me to the back of the hold queue every time I had to call back. I was told repeatedly that the current wait time to hold was about 20 minutes, which seems fine if you're a receptionist and planning to be on the phone all day anyway, but it took me about five hang-ups before I figured out how to answer calls on the other line without losing my place on hold. Finally I decided I would just have to remain on the line NO MATTER WHAT. Bosses walked by and I just smiled at them from the phone, UPS guys came and I signed for packages on the phone, I was able to juuuust reach across the office to fax papers I was given while still on the phone. I vowed that nothing was going to make me hang up. NOTHING. This of course, was when the phone guy showed up unexpectedly and told me hw was here to REPLACE THE PHONE. I am so compeletely not kidding. I (half) jokingly asked whether I actually needed to hang up in order for him to replace it and sadly he nodded yes.

I asked myself what else could possibly go wrong that day and was answered by a missing hubcab on the back wheel of my car when I left work.

To make a long story less long, I have successfully paid my bribe money to the city...or at least haven't heard from them in awhile....but yesterday I got a notice from the library that I have an overdue book.

My Short-Lived Cause

I haven't really had a cause in awhile, you know, something to stand up for and get excited about. The other day, everyone's favorite UCSD former gubanatorial candidate decided to write an opinion article in the UCSD student newspaper, The Guardian, about alleged "misinformation" being given out on tours to prospective students. Here is the article followed by my response:
___________________________________________________________________

UCSD myths do a disservice to students

Daniel Watts

"Ever hear the one about Geisel?”

Apparently, the concrete support arms that surround the main section were an afterthought, necessary to sustain the building’s structural integrity after the architect “forgot” to include the weight of the books in the original design. It’s sinking, too.

Or so goes the myth, first mentioned long ago by some intrepid UCSD student and since spread by word of mouth.

There’s also the one about the Sun God statue: Make a wish as you walk beneath its arch, and it will come true. This myth is a bit less well known. I’ve been here four years and have yet to see someone make a wish. Nor have I heard this myth spread by anyone not employed by the university.

There are myths about UCSD, and then there is misinformation — a blatant disregard for the truth.

This columnist’s audit of three specific campus tours on Jan. 25, Jan. 26 and Jan. 27 revealed misinformation being spread by some of UCSD’s College Ambassadors — a euphemism for “campus tour guides.”

Other than the library, UCSD’s most recognizable symbols are arguably the Koala, the Sun God and the Triton. Only the Triton escaped the clutches of inventive tour guides.
When Koala members along the tour route respectfully offered their newspaper to passersby, a few tour members grabbed copies. The tour guide that day immediately called out, “That paper has nothing to do with UCSD. It receives no funding from the school, the people who run it have nothing to do with us.” He then showed the official student newspaper: the UCSD Guardian. The difference between the two, he said, was that the student government funds the Guardian (it actually does not), and it does not fund the Koala (it really does).

The guide mangled the Sun God festival, too. The “$2 million festival” (actually less than $200,000) was funded entirely by the university (actually funded by the A.S. Council), according to Andrew.

According to another tour guide, the university named Price Center after Sol Price, the woman who founded Costco. It is the central gathering place for UCSD’s 15,000 undergraduates, many of whom have classes in Peterson Hall, named after Jack in the Box founder Jack Peterson. UCSD’s own on-campus fire station protects these buildings. New buildings under construction in the Student Center expansion will include an “international market and grill.”

Speaking of international, UCSD evidently has an “international school” and multiple “international centers” spread throughout the campus.

Not quite.

Sol Price was a man, and he founded Price Club, not Costco. There are 20,210 undergraduates as of winter 2005, the founder of Jack in the Box is named Robert and there is no on-campus fire station.

Student Center will not have an “international market and grill,” whatever that means. Neither does UCSD have an international school (the closest thing is the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies). Although UCSD sends hundreds of its students abroad, there is only one International Center on campus — and that’s more than many other schools.

Some guides treated the parents and students on the tour not only to a deluge of false information about the campus, but granted an interesting take on the college system as well.
This columnist’s home is Earl Warren College, which one ambassador described as having “no well-roundedness” and “straightforward objectives.” It’s a “career-oriented” college, he said, with minimal general education requirements — all of which must be in the same relative field as the student’s major.

Another tour guide had apparently never even been to Warren. When asked to point it out, she stood at the edge of Warren Mall and actually gestured toward a path that, if followed, would lead the wayward student through an ecological preserve, then to Interstate 5.
She also claimed that Warren required an academic internship as part of its general education, and that its philosophy was “bridging the gap between industry and education.”
All of that is wrong.

Cataloguing these tour guides’ transgressions may seem nitpicky, but giving incorrect information about academic requirements is probably the worst offense a representative of the university can commit. What separates each college is a different theme and separate GE requirements, both of which these tour guides mangled. They each cited wildly varying GE requirements for each college, showing a lack of uniformity even in their incompetence. This misinformation does a disservice to the new admits and their parents, some of whom were actually taking notes during the tour.

Assuming guides undergo the same training, or at least read the same campus welcome brochure, there is no real excuse for such varied descriptions of the campus. Of course, there are competent tour guides as well. Among them are seniors who have been involved in campus life for their entire academic careers and know the campus inside and out. It’s a shame that all of them aren’t like that.

Oh, and the Geisel Library myths? Debunked athttp://libraries.ucsd.edu/services/legends.htm.

The UCSD tunnels are real, by the way.

___________________________________________________________________

Ok, so after reading this article, I emailed the tour guide office and was told that all of the quotations used in the article were false. Apparently, the tour guides recognized Daniel Watts on their tours and knew to tell the Tour Coordinator immediately after the tour that he had been belligerent and may fabricate what had been said.

___________________________________________________________________

My response:

Daniel Watts's attempt at expose reporting is only half done. Show me a report on 20/20 where the reporter didn't try to get an interview with both sides. On those hidden camera things, they always have atleast some statement issued from the "exposed perpetrator of crimes against humanity". As a former tour guide I have an interest in how the tour guide program is portrayed and a　UCSD source says、"the remarks that he states were made by our tour guides were actually NOT stated by our tour guides. He made them up in an attempt to discredit the program. I spoke with each one of the tour guides immediately after their tours because he was hostile, aggressive and disruptive onthe tours." The source goes on to say that there were "major discrepancies" as to what was actually said. (I do hope he took another person on the tour and that he's not the only one claiming these remarks were made.)

Whether or not anything incorrect was said, I am a firm believer in the rule of bringing up a problem (actual or invented) to the parties concerned before taking it to the university community as a whole. He left us a bit defenseless and I think it would be a much stronger article if he hadn't come across as so one-sided. If Daniel Watts would like to be anything other than an opinion columnist, he should realize that there are two sides to every story. So again, it would have been nice to note in the article that we are addressing the problem, if such a problem exists, had he mentioned it to us.

It's interesting to me personally, that Daniel Watts has applied for a tour guide job, which is a fact that he probably thinks of as an attempt to remodel our program--now that he has shown it's alleged problems, but I can't help to think of him as anything other than a disgruntled rejected applicant, and if in fact these allegations do turn out to be false, I think we made the right decision in not allowing him to become a part of the tour guide program.

___________________________________________________________________

So there. The day after I was so up-in-arms about this whole issue, I kind of lost interest in the whole thing. But it was nice to have a cause for about fifteen minutes.