Story of the Day 7/14/2011

We were walking from the testing center back to our car, today, and Sarah said to me, “This is truly your Story of the Day.”

In keeping with the moment, I taught her two new vocabulary words.
SNAFU and FUBAR.

Sadly, I was not videotaping her when I explained them. The look on her face was both stunned and one of awe that there were terms that so totally captured the flavor of the day.

Today was Sarah’s midterm test for the on-line math class she is taking through IUHS (Indiana University High School). Sarah submitted her request for the exam, last week. The test was then scheduled and the interpreter was set up, and, early this morning, off we went to the testing center, and Sarah took her midterm.

Okay, that isn’t what happened.
That is what was supposed to happen.


Last Thursday, Sarah submitted the request for the midterm. She requested to be tested at the IUPUI Testing Center, and she requested that the exam be sent to them electronically, as in via email.


At any rate, everything was set up for Sarah to take her midterm test at the IUPUI testing center.
Today.
At 1 PM.
The problem, today, started after all of this was set in motion.
You see, for some reason that we have yet to determine, Sarah’s exam was not electronically sent to the testing center at IUPUI. (Indiana University- Purdue University of Indianapolis, this is the Indianapolis branch of the two large universities on one shared campus.)

I had started calling the IUPUI testing center, last Friday, This was the day after my daughter submitted the request on-line. On Sunday, I sent my first email. I though that it might be helpful for the proctor to have my home and cell phone numbers (in case they weren’t clear on the message I left on their answering machine) as well as my email address, so we could set up a date and a time when the interpreter would be available. Yes, this sounds like I am being compulsive, but since Sarah requires an interpreter, and the interpreter needs to be scheduled, and the program at IUHS has specified an interpreter- so that specific interpreter has to be available, I felt that the earlier this was scheduled at a time that would work for the interpreter, the better. You see, the testing center staff is there 5 days a week at set hours, but the interpreter isn’t – and this seems to be a concept that people who have never dealt with an interpreter just don’t seem to get it. No, you see, we do not have a personal interpreter for Sarah who just rides around with us in the car and goes wherever Sarah goes whenever Sarah goes. Oh yes, and who follows her into the bathroom, and stands in a corner in her bedroom at night, just in case.

We have been working on getting one of those, so if you hear of one, who is fluent in ASL, friendly and housebroken, please let us know.


Since I didn’t hear back from the proctor, I sent her an email, on Tuesday, suggesting a date and time that I had already (from emailing the interpreter) found would work.
A while later, I actually received an email response that Thursday at 1 PM would work, but that the exam had not yet been received.

At that time, a large part of my week became consumed with figuring out where in the heck the exam was, and trying to explain to the testing center that we needed enough advance notice to cancel the interpreter, so, to please let us know if the exam didn’t show up in Wednesday’s mail.

All was quiet.

By mid- day Wednesday, I had called and left two more messages and had also sent another email explaining that we needed to know if the test had not been received.

All was still quiet.

Meanwhile, I was ccing the interpreter, who, because of the lack of response from IUPUI was also not sure if the test was going to happen.

This morning, I was still calling, and I was actually getting a response, not to my calls and emails to IUPUI, but from the interpreter, who was also still hanging.
But nothing from IUPUI.

Finally, I got someone on the phone, but the person was almost inaudible, despite my repeatedly asking her to speak louder, and she couldn’t figure out my daughter’s last name, even though I spelled it, twice. I did ask to be called by the proctor- and was told she would call me in an hour.

But she didn’t.

Sarah and I waited until just before we had to leave, but no response.
So, we drove down to IUPUI, and we arrived there at 12:50 PM.
A young man working in the center took my daughter’s ID, and looked and looked and said she wasn’t on the list to be tested. I explained the situation and that we had been waiting to be called back, and that we were supposed to have been contacted if the exam hadn’t been received, and he wasn’t sure what to do, but he said he would call his supervisor (the proctor) who was at lunch, so we could wait.

So we waited.
A young woman came into the room. A very soft-spoken woman- so soft spoken that I struggled mightily to figure out what she was saying. She was, she said, the person who had called me after the mail came, yesterday, (at 3 PM) to let me know that the exam hadn’t arrived.
She called but she didn’t leave a message. She told me this. Why didn’t she leave a message? Because despite the fact that I gave them both my cell and home numbers, she only called the home number which didn’t have an answering machine. And she didn’t email.

By this time, the interpreter had arrived to enjoy this news.

Then, we all got to literally stand around and wait, and wait and wait for the proctor, because we had to find a date and time that we could come back for the test to actually happen.

About an hour after we had arrived, the proctor showed up. Okay, maybe it was only 50 or 55 minutes.
She was very insistent that they had done their part in responding to me by calling me at 3 PM, yesterday, and leaving me a message.

I am dumb, but not only was no message left for me, the person who actually called me yesterday at 3 PM had, just a while before this, told me that she had NOT left a message. Being told this obvious falsehood to demonstrate the lengths they had gone to impress me, just not positively.


When I explained that no message was left (and, be impressed, I was polite about it) and I asked why the other number hadn’t been called (which does have a message system) and why no email was sent despite my numerous attempt, both after 3 PM, yesterday and this morning to find out if we should come, she said that they can’t be bothered to call anyone more than once and that they did call and leave a message. Except, of course, they didn’t.

Sadly, my telepathy just wasn’t working on quite high enough of a level to have received the unspoken message.
No, I didn’t say that, but I wanted to.

At any rate, we set up two test dates. The lady was very annoyed with me, but we set one up for tomorrow, which we did because the interpreter, who was standing there with her date book ready, as well, happened to be available, tomorrow, even though that was really only allowing for one more mail delivery and one more chance for the missing exam to show up.

And we scheduled one of the test dates for Tuesday of next week as a back up. We scheduled it for Tuesday because the interpreter was not going to be available on Tuesday.
Actually, the interpreter was not going to be available after tomorrow, which meant another interpreter, and if we scheduled it for Monday, that would no leave enough tie to find a different interpreter, and if the exam didn’t show up in the mail by Monday afternoon at 3 PM, I figured it was a missing, as in permanently missing, and we were going to have to start from scratch again, anyhow.

I also did something just a little bit obnoxious I made appoint of asking if there was any way that the exam had been received but had been misfiled under another student’s name.

I was told this was not a possibility.

Okay it was obnoxious, but I really do have a hard time believing that the mail from Bloomington to here (a car ride of less than 90 minutes in a state where mail doesn’t regularly going on long hikes) had gotten that lost in transit, and the weird little fact that, while the first assistant was checking Sarah’s ID against the list, I noticed, since I read well upside down (hey I have to have one or two talents) that they had received an exam for a Sarah with a different last name, from IUHS, via snail mail, for a math class…okay, so maybe there are a lot of those going on during this particular week of the summer and I am just being paranoid, but it didn’t hurt to ask.

But the proctor had already mentioned to me that they almost never have the exams sent to them by snail mail- so the possibility of this being another Sarah in the same course at the same testing center for the same day using the same means of exam delivery that is almost never used…


At any rate, I did receive an email, this afternoon, and they have received the exam in the mail, and the test is on for tomorrow.

But don’t cross your fingers until they are hatched or count your tests until they are taken or something like that, because I might just have another Story of the Day for you after tomorrow’s events.

I hope not.