going postal
Just over a week to go before Registration Day for law school for me, and already I'm in a panic. This isn't your garden-variety 0L to 1L angst. What's getting me down is labor warfare.
In order to matriculate and begin my legal studies, the law school needs an official copy of my undergraduate academic transcript.
Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a big deal; I'd send my letters to the Student Administration wallahs (as the redoubtable Dr. Anil Seal might have called them), and they would turn around the request in under two weeks.
That would be the case now, were it not for a postal strike by the Communication Workers' Union against the Royal Mail. The dispute, as in all things, seems to stem from the Royal Mail's plans to "modernise"--that is, downsize--in the face of competition from private entities and other postal organizations. The posties are having none of it: first they threatened, and then carried out two weeks of rolling strike action against the post office: international deliveries, truck driving, regional sorting offices, and the like.
Consequently, the Student Records wallahs haven't received my written request for a transcript, and thus can't move.
It gets better though. Just when I thought the strike might be over and the mail moving in time to deliver my transcript before registration, the CWU announced a further two weeks of strikes!
Now I'm shafted. I'm writing the dean's office at the law school and forwarding them the story from Auntie Beeb, just to show I'm not bullshitting them. The dean's office was very nice, but they don't seem to understand that I can't actually get hold of a transcript until the posties stop striking.