Alms for the (Soon to Be) Poor
If you’ve been paying any heed to my tweets over the past few days, you’d have some idea of how busy life has been in the little IT office where I work. We are overrun with Commerce students, and they are a difficult lot to support. I try, I work to avoid stereotyping groups of people based upon single arbitrary traits, but the effort involved in this endeavour has been taxing my limits ever since the dozenth or so vapid business major sneered at me for not immediately handing over expensive electronics that don’t now and never have belonged to them.
The fact that we at the IT help desk are neither a store nor medieval serfs frustrates the entirety of these beings’ educations, as they are by all accounts trained to either throw money at a problem until it goes away or else to futz with people until they realize they’re beneath you and spontaneously develop obedience.
The sense of entitlement is like smog around here. I am saying it is thick enough to obscure vision, folks: environmentalists will be pissed and asthmatics will die.
It’s the school year that’s to blame for this influx of walking damned commerce students, and I’d have a lot more ire for these folks if I hadn’t already used up all of my ire in the mental preparations I’ve been doing in advance of my own resumption of academia. I’ve got some goals, and they are ambitious, and with this being the last week before the commencement of my last year of undergrad I have ample time to sit back and interpret the whole ugly vista of the coming eight months as a terror and a menace and probably the greatest set of opportunities ever in my lifetime.
I hate that last bit the most.
So I’ve been keeping tabs on every single bloody page I find offering cheaper alternatives to the campus store for textbooks, in the hopes that I can spend less than five hundred fuck-mothering dollars a semester on books I’ll have no time to ever touch again and will in all likeliness only need to read a quarter of to do well. The more interesting possibilities include trading and renting books, and I sincerely hope I can come to some positive arrangement with one or another of these ethereal options.
The outlook does not look good, however. The book store, in spite of its being a hellish maw filled with smaller, uglier maws, is at least reliable. You know that it’s there, and that you can probably count on getting books in it. It’s what it’s for. I’ve trusted the Internet to deliver all manner of goods to my doorstep in the past, but I’m skittish when said goods will not only serve as the tools to leverage my way through the final horrifying battles of my education, but also cost hundreds of dollars even with hefty discounts.
You might sense that this is a sensitive issue with yours truly, but then again you and your wallet likely sympathize.
BIT PART 