College Rant #1: Bureacracy and Bear Cards

“Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.” 

― George Bernard Shaw

#StoryOfMyDay 

The bane of my existence. No, that's not me in the picture. 

Mondays are actually supposed to be really good for me. I have purposefully scheduled myself to only work four days a week at the law school, and Monday is my day off. I also happen to only have one class on Monday, which is at 11, which means I get to actually sort of sleep in. Sleeping in is seriously one of life's greatest pleasures. 

So today, since I got out of class at 12:15 and had nothing much to do, I decided to do my laptop shopping with part of my hefty refund check. It's totally an academic expense! I'm not even being facetious (this time)- my laptop is almost four years old, literally has parts fall off of it frequently, and now has to stay plugged in at all times because the battery is so dead. If I jostle it just enough to make it come unplugged, it immediately shuts off, taking whatever paper I was working on at the moment into the abyss. 

The stupid thing about Mercer is that it takes like at least two weeks for them to process refund checks after the semester starts. I know that in fall of 2012, I did not get my refund until November, which was crazy. Gotta eat! And you know, buy toilet paper and shit (#lol). So even though it takes that long to process the checks, somehow they can magically transfer as much or as little of my refund as I want onto my student ID/debit card (Bear Card) within a few hours. We can spend the Bear Card at certain locations only, but one of those locations is our local CVS, so I had this brilliant idea to transfer like a lot of money onto my Bear Card, and then use my Bear Card at CVS to put like $500 on an American Express giftcard, and go down to Best Buy for my laptop. Simple, right? Wrong. 

I can literally purchase anything in the store, including booze, except for a giftcard. What the hell Mercer? So now I have like $700 sitting on my Bear Card that I can spend on campus, at CVS, or at one of seven restaurants that accept it. 

And no laptop. 

I would try to fight with the Bursar's Office or Auxiliary Services-after all, it doesn't say anywhere in all their little brochures that this is a thing. But I learned in my first semester here how pointless that would be. I won't say that they're all the most useless people ever...that would just be rude...

Oh, and they won't let you withdraw money off the card. You can get it refunded when you graduate. 

#FML