little commie

wasted a perfectly lovely day queueing to join the students' union. union membership is compulsory and i cannot comprehend why i have to pay good money before i'm allowed to take my exam. shouldn't that be regulated by the university??? why subject me, innocent and unaware exchange student, to the horror that is union membership? ok maybe i'm exaggerating a little but i come from a place where unions are frowned upon and strictly regulated if they're even allowed. yes, i'm not in singers anymore and if i wanted to stay out of a union i should never have come to stocks. but the idea of forcing every hapless kid on exchange or otherwise and extorting sgd96 from them is daylight robbery. this would only be a beneficial relationship (for me) if i happen to get into some medical mishap and require rescuing. which is highly unlikely. plus it might not even be covered, ironically.

but my main grouse is that the instruction was to register between 9am-1pm. as with most other things in stocks, there's a machine dispensing queue numbers. i get there at 1030 and take queue number 294. they were serving number 70. if you do the math, assuming they began at 9, it took them 90minutes to see 70 people. there were 224 more before it reached my turn. if the union registration people worked at a constant rate, it'd take more than three hours till it was my turn (this has all the makings of a bad problem sum)

and. it. did.

so i did what i do best (hog the nearest comfortable seat and stone) which happened to be in the bookshop. found a cushioned armchair and got ready for the long haul. which would've been relatively uneventful if the union hadn't decided that lunch was sacred and some overgrown hippy woman announced that they'd stop work prompty at one (!!!) regardless of whether there were still people with queue numbers in the queue. this was after they switched off the ticket machine at noon, mind you. which's extremely unfair to people who came after because they were supposed to stay open till one and that's presumably refers to the silly queue ticket machine too, doesn't it?

but thankfully our protests got through and overgrown hippy was convinced to let those with queue numbers up to 300 register and the rest had to go by next monday. which worked for me because my number was 294 but not for the other 200-odd people with numbers >300. and then overgrown hippy started yelling at us and telling us that we were holding up the union workers who now had to work overtime because it was already 1330 and they hadn't had lunch yet. so, it's my fault for following their instructions to the T and patiently waiting over 3h to register as a member of a union that i wouldn't ordinarily want to be part of. thanks.

not a positive start to my little commie existence and definitely unimpressed by this union that cannot work through lunch.

on the plus side though, i did meet some cool greeks while waiting my turn. and two pakistanis. and one japanese girl. so it wasn't a complete waste of time because we managed to communicate and commiserate and register our similar displeasure.

.

in other news, i came back to this lovely little surprise on my landing and it stank to high heavens :(