89 Days: Outrageous

from a text I sent earlier today:

"I want to kill someone. I want to bash in their brains with a mallet. Then I want to throw their body off a tall building."

- - -

Now, you may ask - as well you should - what transpired to inspire such a hostile desire? (Though you may have asked it less poetically.) Let me tell you. It involves a conspiratorial gang of thieves with a habit of robbing poor people and leaving them for dead on the side of the road. They call themselves textbook manufacturers.

I was the victim of a new-edition heist. The way this heist works is simple:

Step One: Sell thousands of copies of the book "Fuentes 3rd Edition" and make it required for all beginning Spanish students. This textbook should normally carry them through two semesters of class, which is why we can make them pay $200 for it.

Step Two: Before the next semester starts, "edit" the book by changing the numbering of questions and moving sections around. You don't need to add new material, you just need to switch around a few pages.

Step Three: Publish the "new" edition. Colleges will require this new book for their students who have already gone halfway through the old book. Now if students want to continue their education, they have to spend another $200 to get the 4th Edition, which they will only use the last half of. (See our brilliant evilness?!)

Results: Spanish students will end up paying $400 for the use of a single textbook. Ha ha!




Anyway, this is what happened to me. They tried to get me to buy the new book. I thought that was a load of garbage, plus I couldn't afford it anyway, so I went to my professor. She said that she was going to work around it, letting us work out of the third edition because the only differences between the two books is numbering. Then, being a confused grad student teaching for the first time, she went to the department head for reassurance. She came back today and told us that we actually do have to buy the new book if we want to stay in her class, because even though she thinks it's unethical, that's just the way it is and we have to deal with it.

Well, I can't just deal with it. I can't afford that book. I can't get it used or rent it from anywhere because BYU is the only school that's using it!

So I dropped the class. All I can do is wait until next semester, when I can get the 4th edition used, because I need the class as part of my major requirements.

But it wasn't as simple as that. Because I have a scholarship to live up to. I need to have 14 credits in order to keep my scholarship, and when I dropped Spanish, I went down to 10. So in order to replace the credits I'd lost, I had to sign up for TWO new classes: Biology and New Testament. And now I have to buy three new books (which, by the way, are cheaper all together than the one Spanish textbook they wanted to make me buy).

Needless to say, my already unpleasant re-entry has gone even farther downhill. I am now lying at the bottom of a cliff, with debris all around me, cursing every single molecule in that campus.

Happy September.