The graduation rehearsal
After having spent almost a
month bum… err, vacationing, at home, I was finally able to revisit school
yesterday to get my toga, take graduation pictures, and have a rehearsal on our
commencement exercises.
This is a day where Charles
Dickens’ famous paraphrased line can aptly describe. “It was the best of times;
it was the worst of times.” Indeed, yesterday was a mix of both euphoric highs
and dystopia-like lows. It’s like a boxing match where you know you’ll
eventually win, but you still do not look forward to the blows that will land
on you, however few.
To be exact, (almost) everything went
accordingly. The schedule didn’t understate anything. Most of the events
started on-time, and some even ended early. Plus, it is also nice to again see
people you used to hang around with. Some of my friends actually went all the
way back from elsewhere just to get their toga. Basically, this was among one
of my last opportunities of seeing them, at least in an educational institution
setting. I know that it will be a long time before I get to see them again, and
the mere fact that I still got that chance today makes this day worth more than
any ordinary day of me staying at home and wasting time with 24 Hours DVD’s
(though it is a good waste of time).
Seeing two (among my three)
favorite “eye-candies” was also very worth it, though the quality of time spent
with them this day was not too satisfactory. But hey, that’s better than not
seeing them at all, right?
But not all’s well either,
aside from the fact that my writing today is pretty sloppy and that I used the
word “see” too many times. For one, I’ve spent too much money on stuffs that
are unnecessarily overcharged by our school. And when I say overcharged, I mean
it in a lack-of-quality way, not the typical too-high-price-on-good-items way.
To be more specific, I’ve spent money, quite an amount on that, on mediocre
services. The photoshoot costs P300, yet the photographers made no effort in
taking the picture the way we wanted it. I remember almost shouting “wait” to
the photographer, because I was still grooming my hair when he took the
picture. It’s like the photographer are in too much of a hurry to get their job
done, compromising the quality of their pictures on that process. Considering
that this is a very important event in all graduates’ life, I have to say what
they did was completely thoughtless of others. I’m not the only one who
complained about this as well. What’s up with that?
Second frustrating ordeal is
the money spent on delivering the transcript of record. What I really can’t
understand is why our ID is not validated when in fact we did pay our tuition
fee. This resulted to all graduates not being able to enter school except on
required dates, which means I have lesser chance of seeing Seulki. What does this
have to do with our TOR? Well, since I can’t go back to school on ordinary
days, I opted for the courier service where the school will assign people to
deliver the transcript for us. And guess what, the courier service is
overpriced as expected. The last time I used DHL to deliver a document (which
was 5 years ago) I’ve spend P70. This courier service costs P125. I don’t know
what’s the price of DHL now, but even in the unlikely scenario of DHL being
twice the cost of that courier service, I’d choose DHL any time of the day, for
one reason: DHL delivers on the next day. We are paying courier services that
take 2 months to deliver a transcript of records that take 1 week to finish!
Just how overpriced and inefficient is that?
Suffice to say, I was glad
to have gone to school that day, and was also glad to go home after all the
rehearsals and money-spending. At the end of the day, there’s only one comment
I can give about the whole experience of wearing toga over business attires
while taking pictures on a non-air-conditioned space (yes, space, the DLSU
admin felt too encumbered to give us a room): taking a shower never felt so
good.
