I’m wondering if it’s a by-product of the digital age. I see a potential next semester paper in the frustrations. I’m seeing other people go through them a lot these few months, or maybe I’m just becoming more aware and irritated for and by other people’s issues with communication as I strive to remedy them in myself.

I’ve been having a time where I’ve been getting good deals on several gifts that I picked up over the past week, and I was wondering why, keeping an eye out for something that would backfire because of it. It has in the form of the financial reimbursement I was supposed to get from H.R. for my classes.
I was wondering why my co-worker doing the same thing had received hers at the beginning of the semester and I hadn’t. I thought perhaps it was because this was my first semester and I hadn’t submitted my grades. So, I went over to H.R. and turned my grades in, and asked them to contact me if there was some issue, not a peep, this was last week. So, today I called and the lady got all snitty with me because I was wanting to know what I had done wrong.
It turns out I had submitted the wrong paperwork, but when she explained it to me it turns out this was because of something I hadn’t been told in the first place.

Everywhere I’m seeing this problem. No one over here tells anyone anything, they just expect you to know. So, subsequently you spend your time and stress worrying and having to do things at the last minute. I see it even with my own fiance’s family. I went over there yesterday and he hadn’t even told them I was coming over, which he got told off about.
But financial aid does the same thing, never in any of the paperwork I got was there anything about needing a residency affidavit. Then they got upset with me because I didn’t know. I did find out I had missed the supplemental application stuff, so that was my fault.

It’s as if places and people magically expect you to know. I have a friend who just the other day emailed me to ask me if I wanted to go shopping with her. Here’s me thinking if she really wanted to go with me she would have called me on the phone. It’s as if she’s thinking because she emailed me instantly I would know even though I was actually nowhere near a computer for most of that morning.
The woman I talked to at H.R. was complaining to me that she has forty odd people doing the school thing and only one of them submitted the paperwork correctly, and I’m thinking, well, that should tell you something shouldn’t it? If I was the only one who screwed this up then I would figure it was my fault, but when only one of us hasn’t to me it’s pretty clear they need to fix things on their end. But then, hey, if we don’t submit correctly, they get to keep their money so maybe they don’t want to.

There’s an impatience about people. The faster the internet, email and cell phones get, the more plugged in and constantly on we are the less we seem to actually talk. I see it in myself, I find I’m expecting instant answers to messages I send. I think 50% of my frustration with my group work during the past semester was the fact that the other members aren’t on-line as often as me, so I could check every half hour and see no one else had done anything and work myself up, which isn’t fair. Just because I’m lucky enough to be able to surf at my job doesn’t mean everyone else is. So, I’m working to check that factor in myself, but this doesn’t change the fact that if people don’t tell you something you can’t be expected to know it.