I drove down last week and stayed at the professor's parents' house. It was interesting. Her parents were great and the house was big and beautiful, but in as much need of repair as Mom's.
We had our second or third Zoom date tonight. A friend asked why we didn't just use Facebook.
We tried and it gave us all kinds of problems. We switched to Zoom and it worked great--at first, but the problems were more manageable.
Somehow ENMU figured out that I took some irrelevant classes at a community college fifteen years ago and required me to submit transcripts, which was a pain.
It turned out that the community college somehow messed up my name, but I forgot how.
I squared away ENMU, submitted transcripts to the clearinghouse, and then the clearinghouse said "You attended the community college? You need to tell us about that."
My ENMU transcripts say:
1. I attended fifteen years ago.
2. I didn't take many classes.
3. The classes that I did take had nothing to do with speech therapy.
The clearinghouse told me that my grad school applications were incomplete until I gave them the information (they already had) on the irrelevant community college that I attended fifteen years ago that didn't matter.
I received that e-mail while I was talking to the professor. It seemed like each time that I remembered I was either working or talking to the professor. I wanted to give her my full attention, but I also wanted to knock out this before it was too late.
The clearinghouse gave me three options for requesting transcripts and gave me instructions for each:
1. Find Mesa Community College.
2. Have transcripts sent to the Council of Academic Programs in Communication Science and Disorders.
3. Give them this super secret code. Don't give it to anyone!
None of them showed Mesa Community College. I checked each twice. When I searched for "Mesa" it showed places without Mesa anywhere.
They weren't in Mesa, either.
However, I happened to see that one showed Maricopa Community College.
Mesa is a city in Maricopa County.
I selected that, it asked which community college, and I selected Mesa.
I couldn't find an option to send to the Council of Academic Programs in Communication Science and Disorders, but eventually I found the Communication Sciences and Disorders Centralized Application Service.
Somehow those two are affiliated, so I chose that.
It never asked for the super secret code, which I wrote down because I was told I would need it.
It had me read the terms and conditions for a mandatory $5 transaction. Then it asked if I wanted to attach a file (probably not). I selected No and it said "You totally need to attach a file."
What file? Why?
At this point I had three separate tabs open for one simple task, but none of them mentioned attaching a file, so I made a text file that just had my super secret code.
It said that it wanted my signature. It wanted me to sign with my mouse, but my signature never comes out the way that I want with a pen. My signature with a mouse looks like a drunk kindergartener tried to sign with the wrong hand and had a seizure.
I have an image of my signature, so I found it, but it wanted me to sign a PDF, so I clicked on the button to receive it by e-mail.
It never arrived. I tried multiple times.
However, I did receive an e-mail that my request failed because I did not attach a file.
So, I clicked on "Print, Sign, Scan, and Submit" even though that was obviously stupid, so I wasn't going to.
I saved as PDF and signed it with a program. I tried to upload it, but it said that was un unsanctioned filetype, I needed to use a GIF, PNG, TIFF, or JPEG.
So I exported to PNG, obviously the best.
"That is un unsanctioned filetype. You need to use a GIF, PNG, TIFF, or JPEG."
I tried all four twice each and it gave me the same error. The professor suggested changing the filename and it accepted.
I think that it couldn't handle dashes, but I have had programs give me that error. This didn't.
Apparently it had worse programmers.
It took ninety minutes to figure out all of this because:
It showed the wrong name for the sender.
It showed the wrong name for the recipient.
It specified the filetype, but not in\valid characters in the filename.
We have had better dates!
