Well, I redesigned the site with a few things in mind. One of them was to get a better looking page that loaded faster than the last one. Smaller graphics, and less text on the front page. Right. So what did I do immediately to screw this up? I put a comic on the front page (not the problem in itself) that was about 150k. Duh. Only took me 2 days to realize it, which is about the same amount of time it took me to screw up my whole new “philosophy” of this page. Oh well…
Today I went to the bank to deposit my student loan for the semester. Preceding this was a call to the student load people, and a call to my bank branch. You see, they changed the way the system works, and the big banks no longer are the ones supplying the money (the gov’t now does this…). So I was asking if I could still take all the paperwork to the bank (BC and Canada student loans). The government said that I could, and the bank said that nothing had changed. So when I got to the bank, they said that they could only do one of them (Canada student loan). Great. I don’t know why I ever bother to phone up and ask for help beforehand, the information I get is usually fatally flawed. Turns out the only way to deposit a BC student loan is through the Bank of Nova Scotia (go figure….). So I asked where one was (this was at the Royal Bank). “Oh”, she said, “are you a student of SFU? There’s one up there”! I told her that they had closed it a few months ago. She told me that she had been sending students there for a few days now, and that was the bank branch that she had been told to send them to.
This all leads to the public service problem that really eats away at me. I do not understand why people will give out just any answer they can come up with. This happens all the time (especially at SFU). For example : “Where are the forms so that I can apply for a bursary”? Answer: “if there aren’t any more forms, then you can no longer apply”. This particular stupid answer should have been detected by my brain as being stupid, but since I was talking to someone in financial assistance, I assumed that I might be getting the correct information. So I didn’t apply. I think that particular episode of trust cost me around 300 dollars. Its not that I like people not knowing the answer to questions. Thats one thing, but if they don’t know the answer and then just blurt out whatever comes to their mind first – it can cause real problems. If I am told something like – “Well I think its…… but I’m not really sure so you should check”. Or : “Hang on… let me check”. This is immensely preferable to getting a knee jerk answer that leads me down the completely wrong road. If you don’t know – TELL ME THAT DAMMIT!