and you're supposed to help me find a job...?

The Office of Career Services.  Your best friend in senior year as you try to find a job.  Supposedly.

I just returned from my school's OCS, and I am thoroughly disappointed.  Should I be trusting these people to help usher me into the world of salaries and the 401(k)?

This is basically how on-campus recruitment goes:

1. Attend career fair

2. Drop resume to employer online

3. Get interview

3a. If no interview received, bid for an interview

4. Interview

5. Receive job (double crossed fingers style)

Now, to be able to drop your resume and complete step two, you must have attended two special seminars offered at our OCS: Recruitment Orientation and Interviewing Skills.  This is understandable, if you are a freshmen.  However, I am a senior.  Not to toot my own horn, but all of this job stuff, this ain't new to me.  I've had jobs for years.  I know how to interview.  And I'm attending a good school.  A business program.  I know how to do these things.  I don't need to be spoon-fed directions.  In short, I'm not a fuck-up.

But, beauaucracy is beauaucracy, and to get to step three, I need to attend these seminars.  Too bad the next ones aren't offered until the deadline of step two.  Now, you might say I should have been more on-the-ball about this whole system, but to that I say nay!  OCS is so far removed from our schooling and any mention of it is in passing.  How was I to know that these requirements were so stringent?  And that, without going through this process, to get your resume even looked at by an HR representative at some companies is impossible.  Believe me, I wish I could drop my resume off in other ways, get interviews at these companies through other ways, but that just doesn't seem to be the way things work in the real world.  And this must be what I go by; I'm not ready to enter the real world yet.  Baby steps, remember.

So, today I go to OCS to get all of this straightened out and see if I can possibly progress normally as step two to step three to step four, instead of dealing with that pesky step three-a.

OCS is supposed to be a professional environment.  I'm supposed to be able to trust them with my post-collegiate livelihood.  And, coming from the background of business studies, I think I can tell a poorly run institution when I see one.  And OCS....  

I get there and I swipe my ID card so the computer can read who I am.  It doesn't work.  I look at the student worker at the front desk.  He looks back, says nothing, then turns his head back down to Blender Magazine.  I manually type in my ID number.  It doesn't work.  I try again, this time removing the first identification letter, as the computer so kindly suggests.  Therein lies success!  The message I get?  "Please inform the front desk attendant of your arrival and appointment."  Why I had to go through the computer to do that baffles me.  So I turn to the student worker, who seems as if I had ruined his day, interrupting the latest article about Hilary Duff's budding music career.  

"I'm here to see Kendra--"

"She's right over there," he says, not really gesturing towards a direction.

"I'm right here," I hear a voice call directly from my left.  I look.  "Do we have an appointment?"  this supposed Kendra says.

"Yes, at 1:45."

"Oh, okay.  Give me... 8 minutes," she says.

Looking back at the front desk attendent, I see he has moved on to an article about High School Musical 2 and when I look back to where Kendra was, there is no one to be seen.  So, I make my way over to the waiting room chairs.

Now, I don't mean to sound like an angry stickler (if the duck quacks), but when your position in an organization involves having appointments with people who come visit you, isn't it common courtesy to look at your schedule ahead of time and a) know when you have a meeting and b) who that meeting is with?

Eight minutes later, Kendra returns and asks me to follow her to her office.  On the way, I notice about 20 new iMacs (at $1200+ each).  Does my university really need to update their hardware every time Apple comes up with some new gizmondo?  I begin to wonder where exactly my tuition dollars are going.  Apparently not to the actual efficiency of our career office, just the visage of efficiency.

Sitting down in her office, she asks, "So what are you here for?"  I reply that I'm having problems with my career account in that I can't reach step two in the process outlined above.  She says, "Well, have you attended both the sessions?"  I reply that I haven't, but that resumes are due sooner than the next ones.  "Well, you have to attend those," she says.  I explain that I understand that, but there are other issues here.  "There's one next Friday," she says.  Yes, I explain that I know that, but resumes are due to be dropped the Tuesday before.  "Well, you can still bid (step 3a)," she offers.  

"But won't that put me at a disadvantage?" I ask.

"No."

"If I drop my resume though, they can pick to interview me from that pile, and if I don't pick, then I can bid.  So if I don't have the first step, my only chance is to bid.  Isn't that a disadvantage?"

"...."

"Isn't it?"

She replies in a robotic voice, as if she were a very, very bad actress: "You won't be at a disadvantage."

"I don't think I understand."

"Let's go up to the front desk to see if they can track down if you have actually attended the seminars."

"...Okay," a bit confused I follow her lead.  Honestly, I'm unsure what else I could have said to make the situation better.  So we walk up to the front desk.

"This student (I don't think she remembers my name) might have taken the recruitment seminars, but we're not too sure, can you look it up for us?"  Expecting him to turn to the computer, I instead see him reaching down to pull up one of those mondo 4" three-ring binders full of pink slips of paper.

"When do you think you went?" he asks.

"Um..." not sure what to say I reply, "Maybe last year sometime?"

And that's when my "career advisor" says, "You're going to have to be a little more specific," then, putting on a baby voice, "See he has that binder there?  Each seminar you sign in with the honor code.  So if you say 'last year,' he'll have to go through every seminar we held last year and look for your name."

And my only question now, at the end of this ordeal, is: what are they doing with those dozens of new iMacs?  Playing Monopoly?