Entered on 2001-08-28 at 4:53 p.m..
Ah, the universality of housing staff
Well Matlab has blitzed out once again and forced me to �force quit� the program, thus providing me an excelent opportunity to write in my journal. 7.1 days left at my summer intership, and I�m ready to move on. Its not that the internship isn�t interesting work, its just that all of the other students are gone. We never really bonded anyway, which is sad, but true. I�m almost done with my improvements to the simulator�s flight dynamics. YEAH! I will have more confidence when I finally wrap it up and can demo it. For now it is at that almost-there stage which could last another few months.
So as I begin to wrap up my summer in DC, I�m beginning to get excited about England. I must admit this is probably the biggest thing I�ve ever done with so little reconisance. I�ve never seen the school. Haven�t met my advisor. Have absolutely no idea what my address or phone number will be. If you know me well, you might have guessed its driving me nuts. And its not that I haven�t tried to figure some of these things out.
Case in point is my housing (accomodation). I will be livng in a shared house, which is described in detail on the Cranfield website as:
A number of the larger houses on the campus have been converted into self-catering accommodation for single students. They are in units of 6 to 8 bedrooms per house. Crockery, cutlery and cooking utensils are provided, heating and lighting are included and students provide their own bed linen and pillows.
That is it. Nothing more can be known about them. I know because I have tried in vain to pull more information from the housing woman, who in my opinion, is on a power trip. We have had several email encounters, where I have overly politely asked a rather normal question such as, �I�m planning to attend Cranfield in the fall, could you please explain my housing options.� To which the reply was, if you�ll be attending in the fall then you�ll receive a packet with your other information. This packet was literally a copy of the webpage. As I mentioned before everything that has ever been writen about acommodatio at Cranfield fits onto one webpage.
Recently this lady and I have been fighting over both my arrival time and my address. Because the Marshall Commission is flying all of us over together, we have little say in when we arrive. We will be unleashed upon the country on the 28th of September. My term at Cranfield does not begin until the 8th or 9th of October. Now according to the Marshall people the schools were notified of our early arrival and asked if this would present a problem. Nobody from Cranfield responded. So when I asked the housing woman when was the earliest I could take up residence, her reply was a polite but firm, not until the day before your term.
This prompted me to email Lisa A very nice lady who works for the Marshall commission and with us and ask her what I should do with myself. Lisa was enraged.
�I must admit that I'm rather disappointed that Cranfield have not mentioned to us before now that you may not be able to occupy your room before 7 October. In correspondence to both the accommodation office and the registry at Cranfield I have mentioned that we would like your room to be available from 28 September and have asked them to alert us if there are problems with this. They have not been in contact with me to say this would be a problem.�
Ok, so you don�t think she sounded enraged? Well, that is the first negative thing I�ve ever read from her. Lisa wanted me to write to Janet and explain the situation, I believe this only made the situation worse. Here is an excerpt from Janet�s reply, �Karen was informed in my email to her on 25/6/01 that her room is guaranteed from the day prior to her registration which is possibly 3/10/01. She was also informed that it would be much later before we could let her know if her accommodation could be made available earlier, as the current students do not commence vacating the accommodation until the weekend of 15/9/01."
So needless to say, when I wrote the other day for an address I was not surprised to get the following response, �As your exact address if not yet known - please depatch any belonging to Lanchester Hall as the receptionist will be thereto sign for them. It is no good sending them to a house because if there is no one at home the delivery people will not leave the packages.� I guess it would have been a good idea to tell her that I have 500 lbs coming, and although the receptionist can sign for them, I doubt she�ll have room for them. I admit though it would be fun to see the expression on her face when 500 lbs of stuff shows up at Lanchester hall. (evil grin) But then I�d have to lug it god knows how far to my new place.
Its good to know that university housing staff are universally helpful.