This one was a phone call with a helicopter parent of the most uptight variety.
She started off the conversation by letting me know she was not impressed with the college and how they were handling her son's application.
(Way to ingratiate yourself to the human being who has actually called you back promptly after leaving your message on the impossibly automated phone tree.)
Turns out the application had been submitted weeks ago sans sealed transcript, which submission is the pivotal event that has to happen to get someone evaluated and into the system in the first place, and which submission is clearly spelled out on the program's web page which she didn't care to follow my instructions to actually look at.
So because the transcript had yet to be delivered, the son missed the deadline for 2014 intake and now has to wait until 2015.
WHICH IS CLEARLY MY FAULT.
So she is going off about how unimpressed she is and how she's gotten nothing but the runaround and now I can't tell her if he can get in with his marks because she doesn't know what his marks are and the transcript is sealed so she can't open it to look, and she kept interrupting to say "let me finish", which didn't let me provide the information the student needed, and it was getting kind of annoying at the end of my day on the Friday before a long weekend, so I said "Is there any reason why we can't speak to the student directly, is he out of town or something?"
We try to feel them out at this point to see if there is a learning disability issue that needs to be addressed, but protocol requires that we never ask that question directly. In any case there was no answer from her that was remotely helpful...
She decided to take THAT very personally for some reason and started going off on me about excuse me, do you even have kids?? why would you even ask that question?? blah blah blah vent vent vent
I mean, the woman was incensed.
So I tried to explain that we deal with 22-year-olds pretty much every day and most of them are OK with dealing directly with the details required for college enrolment, but she just decided to hang up at that point.
She had given me her email address to send info for him, so I sent the appropriate stuff that OUR department can help him with if required, and made a point of just addressing him by name on it and leaving her out of it completely...
I expect there will be blowback next week but fuck me running, is she going to do his homework for him if and when he finally does get into the program?
Some folks need to learn to just let go...
[This message edited by FaithFool at 12:18 PM, May 17th (Saturday)]