You're a Vortex of Misfortune, Charlie Brown

J.S. Nelson spotted it last Thursday, it simply took a little time to arrive:

Dear SCOTT ERIC KAUFMAN,

We are concerned because university records indicate that you did not officially register for the Fall quarter 2007 regular academic session, nor was the paperwork filed with the Office of Graduate Studies requesting an academic leave of absence. The deadline for registering is the end of the third week of classes. As a consequence, your status as a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine, has lapsed.

You may apply for readmission if you wish to resume graduate study at a later date. We hope all is well with you and that you plan to continue your education at UCI in the future.

OFFICE OF GRADUATE STUDIES

If you guessed it was in reference to this, you wouldn't be wrong. 

Comments

[Tom]

You poor man. What did you ever do to anger the gods this much?

[SEK]

I think it's what I haven't done. As a Jew, I'm supposed to have built tabernacles and sacrificed hooved beasts.

I've been slacking.

[Sisyphus]

Oh shit, oh shit!!! What does this mean, what does this mean? Quick, tell me it can be fixed!

You're making me freaked out and anxious with all this, and I'm not even the one affected. Icky, nasty quarter system and scrounging for fee money.

Now I'm going to go stare at the bursar's web site, trying to figure out why it won't issue me the rest of my loan money, instead of the job wiki. You've reawakened the barely dormant paranoia.

(And if you can't get all that settled up, remember that you can always matriculate over here! We have plenty of room and there's always teaching to scrounge up. Better weather too.)

[SEK]

Well, they say I can reapply for admission at a later date, and that's encouraging. I've already talked to my graduate director, and she says she's got things under control, so I'm sure this is a temporary expulsion. Still, it feels weird. All the work I did today?

Technically, it wasn't "graduate work," since I'm not a graduate student. What was it then?

[JAKE]

Unpaid labor! That's what!

Those blood-sucking bureaucrats, how dare they!

[SEK]

I just realized something else: I can't call this an academic blog anymore.

I'm not an academic.

I'm a .. I'm a ... I'm an independent-scholar-blogger. ("Indescologger"? "Indie-schlogger"?)

[John B.]

You mention that you've been slacking in your religious obsequies. I'd recommend not reading Job for a while . . .

In my last semester of working on my master's, I (mistakenly) thought that because I was only working my way through the reading list in preparation for comps and my thesis defense, I wouldn't need to register for thesis hours. Dumb of me, I know; but no one informed me of just how dumb this was until the chair of the department saw fit to inform me, immediately after I had passed my examination and defense, that because I hadn't been registered for thesis hours I wouldn't be able to walk at summer graduation. This was more than a little distressing, seeing as I'd already accepted an invitation to begin work on the PhD at Rice that fall. All worked out well: I just signed up for thesis hours for that fall and walked in December, and the grad studies chair at Rice, when I told him what had happened, said, "We don't care about that piece of paper." Whew. But still.

Best of luck in all this.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Hey, I already addressed the whole anger-the-gods bit, only to get a request for something more sciencey. A "vortex of misfortune" is sciencey?

I dropped out of grad school to pursue an exciting career in environmental activism before actually getting a job in said field. So for a few months I worked temp jobs in a warehouse, as a secretary, as a proofreader, hmm, light non-unionized garment work... lots of fun.

But seriously, good luck. You weren't actually getting paid, though, right? So isn't the main problem losing your health insurance? You should most certainly pull whatever strings need to be pulled to avoid losing health insurance. Other than that, what can they do, not graduate you? I'd think that you could just sort of promise future employers that your piece of paper will be forthcoming, right? Hmm that doesn't sound so good at second thought.

[Timothy Burke]

Keeerist.

Q. Why hasn't there been a huge fucking earthquake in Irvine yet?

A. It's waiting for the day SEK has to defend his dissertation.

[Adam Kotsko]

You are currently the homo sacer of graduate study.

[Stephen]

I'm sure this will be sorted out, eventually. I had some horrible experiences with Irvine's administration (all revolving around my status as a foreign student), and in each case the graduate secretary fixed things for me - generally by getting in touch with the right person and exploding at them over the telephone.

[Belle Lettre]

I am your friend, but I imagine your enemies must have the easiest job in the world. They never need to pray for wrathful vengeance to be smited on thee; they never have to fiddle with voodoo dolls, or otherwise do anything but sit back and wait for something bad to happen to you.

However, as your friend, I and your other friends have our work cut out for us if we wish for luck and happiness to be visited upon you. I think both Luck and Happiness forgot your address or something.

If I was the praying type, I'd pray for you, but it looks like all I can do is send you a care package!

[k8]

Wow. Just wow. And, I hope your grad director has the power to fight academic bureaucracy. Nothing is quite so insidious.

[Joss]

Underappreciated of the world, unite and show the world what they've been missing, if they have been, which they should have been, because we are awesome.

That wasn't nearly as rousing as I'd hoped it would be.

I'm a terrible person, aren't I? But I have intentions, and the majority of them are good! (Except for the ones that aren't, which are whadyacallem, malevolent? Yeah, that's the word.)

[Jonathan Dresner]

When good bureaucracies go bad....

Sorry, Scott.

[Karl Steel]

Kotsko: funny.

SEK: uh, you don't have any student loans do you? You may want to make sure that news of your expulsion doesn't reach those companies. I can only imagine they're even more difficult to manage than libraries.

[Rich Puchalsky]

This is an example of what I think of as a "bounce", not knowing the actual terminology. A poor person kinds of gets along for a while, and then there's the unforeseen event that momentarily empties their supply of cash. At which point all sorts of things fall apart that you never would think fall apart. For instance, car goes unfixed -> car dies -> lost job -> lost "workfare" -> who knows what happens to the kids. Scott's is more grad-student-y, but I could still see payment for classes delayed -> lost grad student status -> lost health insurance + delay in ability to get job -> uninsured health crisis.

Point being, this:

"Well, they say I can reapply for admission at a later date, and that's encouraging. I've already talked to my graduate director, and she says she's got things under control, so I'm sure this is a temporary expulsion."

is probably not good enough. How exactly does she have things under control? What later date? Why is it being treated as a temporary expulsion rather than as a clerical error? Believe me, you do not want it to percolate through everywhere that you've had a temporary expulsion, and for them to who knows what -- take away your parking permit? Kick you out of subsidized housing? Prevent you from using the library? (Yeah, I know, so what.) Call your loans due, as Karl said? Start removing you from I'm-looking-for-a-job lists?

From previous altercations with Internet stalkers, I suspect that you have a free lawyer you can call on. Call on them. Hell, call on chits from everybody.
Don't do anything that would look bad from an would-this-person-be-trouble employability standpoint later, like screaming and yelling at your departmental people, but do not stint on calling on your social network to fix anything and everything at this point.

And that is my as always unsolicited advice.

[j.s. nelson]

Scott, if it makes you feel any better, you're not the only one that this sort of thing happens to. Prepare for maudlin tale #2: the story of how my high school years ceased to exist.

After I left NYU I took some forced time off. Forced in that I couldn't seem to go back to college no matter how hard I tried. I'd get into schools that promised a full backing to monetarily disadvantaged students such as myself, only to discover such packages were composed of more loans per semester than my family made in a year.
After some time I decided to apply to UT Austin, as I'd presumably have much better luck at a state school. I'd resisted this urge before, because UT had rejected me in the first round of applications even though NYU and Columbia hadn't.
So I sought out my old high schools to get my transcripts... only to find that they didn't exist. There was no longer any record that I ever went to high school. My grades, everything I'd worked toward for those years, all those homework assignments.... gone. I had no way of proving that I went to high school at all.
In a certain way this wasn't particularly surprising. The first school I'd gone to was a tiny (tiny) private high school which had since shut down, and the second was so badly managed that I had opted to get a GED instead of returning for my senior year or dealing with the horrifying prospect of trying to transfer my credit from there elsewhere.
Still, it was somewhat disturbing to essentially just lose a few years. I would explain what happened further, but it's better summed up by the exhasperated first (later to be heavily revised) draft of a letter I wrote to UT to explain why my transcripts would be late:

To whom it may concern,

I did not anticipate needing my transcripts again, as it’s been so long since high school. Apparently I was not alone in this assumption: Mrs. Francis E.P. Bradshaw, the director of the now defunct Andrew Austin Montessori informs me that the only remaining copy of my transcript from her school is the one that I have spent the last several days searching for. It was in a filing cabinet, in a storage unit. On it, my name is spelled wrong and there is no GPA or class rank (though I can assure you I was first in my class, this is not particularly meaningful as there were perhaps one or two other students in my grade). It is apparently the only record of my high school career.
I’ve spent some time trying to locate my transcripts from USLC. Upon first visiting them, I was redirected to the district office of Honors Academy, which was closed for the holidays. I called in vain for some days before they returned. On requesting my transcripts, I was “transferred” which meant that I heard a series of beeps and was then disconnected. I called again, and was directed to a woman’s answering machine, where I left a message with my phone number. A day passed and I called again, and this time the first person who I spoke to took down my information and said she’d call me when my transcripts were ready. I waited two days before calling again, to be sent to a different answering machine, which instructed me to leave a message or press zero for assistance. I pressed zero and was disconnected.
I drove to the district headquarters of Honors Academy. The building was a lifeless brown and I almost expected it to be guarded by jaguars. Upon entering, I could not locate any way to alert the missing secretary to my presence. Another person waited silently in the room and I squashed my urge to call for the secretary loudly. I waited. After passing by the doorway twice (over the space of about fifteen minutes), a pale woman poked her head in and asked me if I had been helped. She looked as though she had been crying and when I answered her, every word of mine seemed to hurt her slightly, even as timid as my voice can be. She walked away, and I stared at the floor, trying to avoid eye contact with my mysterious waiting room companion, who the secretary had not acknowledged in any way, and who was now staring directly at me. An indeterminable period of time passed. The pale woman returned and said something along the lines of “well, the ah, the woman who was supposed to find your, well, she’s been sent over to the… the…” She put her hand on her head and closed her eyes before continuing, “The Irving campus. There’s been some.. it seems we’ve had some trouble finding what you… we’ll call as soon as we can locate your records. I’m sorry for the trouble.” She seemed on the verge of tears again. I smiled and told her it was not a problem though I felt as though all life had been beaten out of me. I left the office quickly as she kept apologizing uncomfortably.
At this point, I began collecting other official documents pertaining to me, out of fear that proof of my existence would slowly dry up. Attached is the only remaining official record of the fact that I went to high school. If I hear back from USLC, I will get my transcripts to you as soon as possible.

Thank you for your patience,

J.S. Nelson

Ultimately, my transcripts were not found. The principal of the school "reconstructed" them by calling my old teachers and asking if they remembered what I got in their classes. On the upside, I think my GPA improved. On the downside, I was rejected by UT for not getting my materials in on time, and I spent another half a year in waiting, before I could return to college.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Editing out the jaguars was probably a good idea, J.S.

[j.s. nelson]

The ultimate version that was sent was perhaps two or three lines long. Edited was perhaps the wrong word. As I started that one, I my exasperation boiled over and I completed it and deliriously managed to get it in a stamped envelope before wiser minds made me rewrite it.