Saturday, June 7, 2008

Argh!
As many of you may already know, I have very little tolerance for bureaucracies—particularly when “that is our policy” is used as an excuse to not act on a problem. In the last couple of weeks my frustration with the bureaucracies at ODU has hit the limit. Staffing issues lead to my being reimbursed for expenses from Feburary five months later . Paperwork prevented me from receiving paycheck on the first of this month. And the last straw—I received PhD exemption for 3 credits of tuition in error. By the time the error was discovered by the college it was past the deadline to apply for the financial aid that would help pay for it. When I contacted the office that made the mistake to see if I could defer payment until fall, I was told that the $1000.00 was due now and that policy prevented them from making deferments. Bureaucracies are run by people, people make mistakes, therefore the policies of a bureaucracy need to be flexible enough to accommodate the problems caused by the mistakes.
Time to get back to less stressful things like comprehensives, dissertation proposals and candidacy.

1 comment:

Andrea Dellit said...

what a crock. I hate them, too. Why can 't people just admit when they make mistakes and go around their freaking policies when they make mistakes. Too bad there isn't a "we won't make mistakes" policy.