Bought my Books

I bit the bullet and bought my books.  It was weird to me, going into class unprepared, but at orientation, the senior students were saying that we shouldn't buy all our text books at once, because we wouldn't necessarily need all of them, and there might be cheaper alternatives even if we did.  Even the teachers said that we wouldn't need them in the first week.

Well, it's true that we didn't need our textbooks in the first week, but each teacher made it out like their textbook was pretty freakin' necessary, and I wasn't finding any other cheaper alternatives.  So I just bought them.

The lineup was insane.  I've checked the lineup every day and it always stretches completely down the hall.  And that's only for the opportunity to get in the store and look for your books.

Once inside it wasn't bad, though.  There were signs with the names of each course and the titles of the books necessary posted throughout the store, and there was staff running around asking people if they needed help.  When one girl asked me if I needed help and I told her the name of the book I was looking for, she looked at the list for my course, asked which ones I'd found, and then she went and got all three of the ones I hadn't yet found.

One of my textbooks was sold out, though.  Don't really know what to do about that.

My family had one of those cell phones that you buy phone cards for, and just top up at your leisure.  Last time we'd used it, I'd brought it along with me to CWY and used it to call back home a few times.  We weren't using it for communication, so we didn't top it up for a long time.  Well, I brought it with me to college, and I just bought a top-up card, and it doesn't work.  A little research online tells me that your phone number gets deactivated if you don't top it up for 180 days.  Kind of a bummer, since I thought the point of these things was that you didn't have to make any kind of payment plan.  Now I feel like a cripple.  Everyone has a cell phone. Even that homeless guy who was complaining about some guy stealing his weed and who threw a "testing punch" my way received a text message during the course of our interaction.

Well, I can still use this old phone as a timepiece, since I forgot my watch, and also as an alarm clock.

Yesterday, we had a meeting.  It was a repeat of a meeting that happened during move-in day, but I'd missed it.  I don't know how I would not have missed it, since I didn't see any effort made to notify anyone about it.  My roommate missed it, too.  A lot of people missed it.  It was just going over the basic rules of Residence, and apparently we have a monthly meeting.

I've got a plastic wristband on that I have to wear for two weeks.  During those two weeks, I cannot enter or leave residence without my wristband.  If I lose it, it's a $20 fine, and if I had missed the meeting that second time, it would have been a $50 fine.

And with the motivator of that fine, it kind of troubles me how sloppy their attendance system was.  I managed to get on the list, but I could imagine them easily having missed me.