How government (almost) screwed up my future

Alternate title: Working at Enjoying the Decline

Me: Waiting for the letter telling me that I can finally register for classes at the technical college where I’ll be spending the next 18 months learning to weld. Background here. The lay-off date was bumped back to August 5th.

Washington State Legislature: Taking their own sweet time to pass a budget. The technical college will not know how many students it can enroll until the budget is passed.
The Democrats want a huge increase in education spending. The Republicans want only about half the Democrats increase and also want a clause giving school principles the ability to refuse to accept known bad teachers who are being transferred from other schools and into their schools.

This argument took months. The budget was passed at the end of June. We’re still trying to figure out who got what. Most likely, the Democrats caved on the their full spending increase and the Republicans caved on their bad teacher clause.

Local technical college: Hearing that the budget had been passed I called the college multiple times attempting to find out if I could finally register for classes. However, the person who was my only contact as to whether I could register was on vacation for two weeks and would return on the 15th. No one else on the entire campus could apparently answer my question. I was told to wait for my letter.

The United State Postal Service: On June 20th, someone attempted to break into the community mailbox on my street. They peeled the USPS access door back far enough to access the top five boxes and the USPS refused to deliver mail to anyone in the box.

I called the USPS on the 21st to find out where my mail was going and was told to go to a certain post office branch near my home. This information was wrong. I was told by the workers at this location to go to another USPS branch. This information was also wrong. These employees instructed me to go to a USPS annex office further by both road and as the crow flies from my neighborhood than either of these other two branches. Thankfully, this information was correct.

When I arrived at the annex, I was told again that no mail would be delivered until the box was repaired. I asked who was responsible for the repair and was told by the first person I spoke to that my neighbors and I were. However, a second USPS employee said that, depending on the box itself, the USPS would complete the repairs.

I asked that we work to figure out this technicality and was told that they would look into it and that I could stop by the following Monday to get my answer.

I went back on Monday, June 24th and was told that the USPS would be the ones responsible to repair the box. I asked when they would be out to repair the box and was told they would put in a “work order” and that it would be “a week or two”. I also asked if I could collect my undelivered mail. After the person came back out from behind the back area, I was told I could not get my undelivered mail because the carrier had dumped the undelivered mail into a bin and “unsorted” it all. I would have to wait until they had time to re-sort it and to come back in a couple days.

I came back on the 26th only to be told that the carrier had again “unsorted” the mail and they had not yet had time to re-sort it all. This happened again on the 28th. And the 1st of July. On the 3rd I was given a handful of my mail, but not all of it, and no letter from the school.

Finally, on Monday the 8th the mailbox was fixed and some of my two week old mail was delivered. But no letter from the school. Later that evening, one of my neighbors knocked on my door with a handful more of my mail. I was possibly overly thankful to my neighbor since the letter from the college was in that pile of mail.

The letter had been mailed on July 1st. I received it from my neighbor on Monday evening and I had to report to the school to register for classes by today.

So I’m sure you can guess where I was at and what I was doing yesterday morning.