tempted

I'm tempted to just post a whole bunch of pictures because, well, I figured out how. And I like advertising Africa and I have some amazing photos of Africa. But I always find it boring when people post one miiiiiillion photos on their blogs, so I won't.

Yesterday I sent in all my stuff for a scholarship that had to be postmarked by yesterday and most of it was fine and my references were fine and all was on time, but at the last minute (that would be Wednesday afternoon, while babysitting) I realized that when they said, "cumulative college transcript" they probably did not mean, as I had assumed, my undergraduate transcript but college and law school. The application is for people all the way from high school up to grad school, so the instructions get a bit confusing.

Yesterday morning I went to the Registrar's Office at the law school and filled out a form for an official transcript, but they told me it would take five to seven days and I could send in an unofficial one pending the sending of the official one and the two women behind the counter were glued to their computer screens and had no time or patience for me, so I left, but then I started thinking, sitting in class, and what I thought was this:

There has to be some way to get around this.

One of the side effects of having been female, blonde (enough), and young in Africa is that I no longer believe that the rules apply to me. Well, the RULES I believe apply to me, but not the rules, the bureaucratic nonsense that controls so much of our lives. Now that I think about it, there are other reasons for this belief I have, but they are more boring. Anyway, I learned in Rwanda that, for example, it's not strictly necessary to actually possess all the documents that you are supposed to have (and, conversely, that actually possessing all the documents you are supposed to possess will not necessarily be enough - there will always be more they can ask for). And those rules about where you are supposed to be allowed to go and what you are supposed to be allowed to do? I would say more but I might incriminate all the nice people who've helped me out.

Just so you know, I never paid a bribe of any sort to get around the rules. Mostly I got around rules through a strategy that I like to call, "Give people a chance to use their power for good, not for evil." That is, by helping me. There is usually someone in every bureaucracy who has the power to do things a bit differently than they are usually done.

So yesterday, when I needed a transcript immediately, I took matters into my own hands. I went to the regular registrar (not the law school) and asked them and they told me to call the main processing center, which I did and described the situation for the woman in such a way that she could best show her power through good and not evil and one fax later she was calling me honey and printing out my transcript and bringing it to the mailbox herself to make sure it was postmarked Dec. 1. There are, after all, really really nice people who are also trapped working for the horrible bureaucracies (which I can only imagine is even worse than trying to get the horrible bureaucracies to work for you).

I miss the days of my undergrad college, where I think I still owe them about $20 for transcripts they've sent out but they still keep sending them out for me and where once when I couldn't get the fax machine to work to fax the request, the nice lady just asked me lots of questions to prove my identity and then faxed the transcript to me.

Any sensible person would tell me, "You need to learn to deal with the consequences of your actions and get this stuff done on time." And I will, I will. But in the meantime, it's nice to have some people who will help me out of messes of my own creation.