Shocked

Wow, I must say, I am, as in the title, shocked. Shocked.

Let me backtrack for a second. At Wesleyan (which, if you remember, is where I last went to college), registration was a nightmare. I have no proof of this, but I just get the feeling the school's board of directors sat in a room for a day scheming to come up with the most painful, anxiety-inducing, stressful, and inefficient way to pick classes humanly possible. The process went something like this. At your appointed time on your appointed day, you packed into a small computer lab with a bunch of other students (essentially the number of computers in the lab plus one or two) and sat down at a computer, bringing up the registration website. With 30 seconds to go before your scheduled registration time, the person in charge would start the countdown. 30 seconds...25 seconds...20 seconds...15 seconds...10 seconds...9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1...CLICK! At the moment the word click was spoken, it became a mad dash to try to secure spots in your classes of choice before they filled up. If you clicked a hair too early, you would lose a couple of seconds before you could re-click, and if you clicked a hair too late, most likely your class would be full. If you were really fast, you could maybe get into two popular classes. After these two clicks, all that was left were the dregs. Classes nobody wanted to take. So you had two choices: take the crappy classes, or go with a 2-class schedule and hope to pick up the rest in drop-add. Not good times.

So, you'll understand if I approached this morning (my registration time) with trepidation. I didn't know the exact process of registering at UM, but I just assumed it would be some variant on medieval torture. So, I walked to the registrar's office with my class-request-sheet. I waited in line for about five minutes, then I sat down, handed my sheet to a woman at a computer, showed her my ID, and waited for another minute. She handed back my sheet and said, alright, you're good. No stress, no anxiety, and I got all five classes I wanted. As I said, I was shocked. There's an episode of the short-lived but brilliant television cartoon version of the comic strip Dilbert in which Dilbert is fired from his terrible job at his terrible company. With a little help from Dogbert (and of course help means completely bs-ing his résumé) Dilbert gets a job at the top engineering company in the country, Nirvana Corp. The name essentially describes the experience of working there. Dilbert cannot believe that he doesn't have to fill out forms to obtain pens, or that more than one copy machine works, or that there is no marketing department. Of course, when the boss hears his marveling at the lack of a marketing department, one is immediately created, quickly and totally destroying the company. But what matters in this rambling comparison are the feelings Dilbert experiences at the way things work at his new job. He doesn't so much feel happiness as shock and incomprehension. This is how I felt today after registering for classes.

Now I just have to be sure and not screw up the rest of this semester.