I go to an art school. It isn’t exactly an academic powerhouse, but I don’t go there for the academics. I’m there to study sequential art and animation, and I’m in one of the best possible environments to do that. Here, have an acrophobic cartoon flour sack:

When I start doing something, I’m typically aware of what I’m signing up for. I don’t like causing a fuss, and, despite my authority issues, I’m not really much of an anarchist. If the punches have been explained to me beforehand, I’ll typically roll with them. For example: I spent two years as the only practising Jew in a Church of England boarding school. I could very easily have made a scene about being asked to attend evensong twice a week, but that would have made the decision to study at a Christian school rather silly in hindsight — so I joined the choir instead. It made evensong much more fun, and gave me leverage when I asked for the High Holy Days off school.

Similarly, when I started attending art school, I knew going in that I wasn’t going to be reading Tolstoy and declaiming in Latin. I expected that most of the academic classes would be too easy for me, and most of the art classes would be too difficult (and were they ever!). I worked out well ahead of time which academic requirements I would argue, and which I’d meekly sit through for the easy grade, and I figured I had it sorted.

When you first start at a new college, the advisors like to boss you around. “These are the classes you’ll take in your first semester”, they say, with a voice of inimitable authority, and very few students question it. Those who do tend — like me — to have already had some college experience at a different school. We know better, we sly cognoscenti, and I had already determined that the first semester’s English classes were so far below my level I couldn’t have spotted them with the aid of a telescope and a dowsing rod. After all: I just used the word cognoscenti, didn’t I?

Unfortunately, my advisor was far less prepared for this scenario than I, and thus followed the most frustrating phone conversation of my life as I tried to convince her that no, I did not need to take remedial English and quite refused to waste my time on it. The conversation went something like this:

Her: Well, LA 108 is a prerequisite for most other Liberal Arts classes…

Me: Unless I waive out of it, which the Liberal Arts department webpage clearly states is an option.

Her: So you don’t want to take LA 108? It’s a very useful class…

Me: No, thank you, I think I’ll be fine. How do I waive out of it?

Her: You have to take a placement test.

Me: I’m an online student. Can I do that locally?

Her: Yes, you can take it here in San Francisco.

Me: I mean locally to me, you silly bint*. I’m in Denver, Colorado.

Her: Yes, we have a testing center in Colorado. The next test date is…next Monday, at 1pm.

Me: But that’s right in the middle of a work day.

Her: Should I put you down for that test? There’s a $35 non-refundable test fee. Would you like to pay by credit card?

Me: What? Wait, we’ll come back to that. Are there any other test days?

Her: The next available placement test is October nineteenth.

Me: You mean right in the middle of the semester I’m supposed to be registering for? What am I supposed to do in the meantime?

Her: Well, we can sign you up for LA 108…

Me: Never mind. I’ll take the test on Monday. Where’s the test center?

Her: Colorado Springs.

Me: What? But I’m in Denver — and I don’t have a car. Isn’t there a closer center?

Her: Our Denver test center doesn’t have any places left for the next test.

Me: How many people can there possibly be…never mind. How am I supposed to get to Colorado Springs without a car?

Her: Is there public transit?

Me: You’ve never been to Colorado, have you?

We went on like this for a while. A good while. According to her, it was either skip work to walk the seventy miles to Colorado Springs in the snow, or register for the class and take the test at the Denver center months after it was remotely relevant — and all that was before we even approached the $35 test fee, which I didn’t have because I’d just spent the last of my money on the registration fee for classes.

The conversation went from a circle to a Mobius strip, and eventually I realised I was stuffed. There was no way out of this. I couldn’t get to Colorado Springs, I couldn’t pay the test fee and I needed to register for something. More out of desperation than any remaining hope I could avoid taking a remedial English class online (and please, stop for a moment to think about what that experience is actually like), I tried one last plea:

Me: Isn’t there anything else I can do?

Her: You could give me your SAT scores. If they’re high enough you can waive out of the class that way.

Me: What, right now? Over the phone? For free?

I half expected her to charge me $35 for the privilege of telling her my SAT scores, but I was okay with that if it ended up saving me a lot more on a useless and frustrating class. And I knew it would: I got a perfect score on my English SAT. That was something I could remember without even having to pull up my online CollegeBoard account — which was good, because I had absolutely no idea what my login details were.

Me: Do you need all the results, or just the English ones?

Her: We only use the English ones*. What was your score?

Me: Okay. I got full marks.

Her: Yes, but what was your score?

Me: Um…it was full marks.

Her: I need the actual numerical score.

Me: Really? I don’t know the actual number*. Can’t you just put down that I got full marks?

Her: Can you find out what your score was?

Me: I…I think so? Do I have to, though? I mean, I just told you three times that I got full marks. That isn’t accurate enough?

Her: I don’t know what you mean.

Me: Well, you know what the top possible score is, right?

Her: Yes.

Me: Okay, whatever number that is: that’s the number I got.

Her: You mean a 1600?

Me: Is that the top possible score? The highest there is?

Her: Yes.

Me: Then I guess that’s what I got.

Her: I still really need you to confirm your actual score.

At that point, I actually used the words “Hold, please” for the first time in my life, and muted the phone so she didn’t hear me say something instantly regrettable. I think it took me ten minutes in the end to track down enough of my CollegeBoard login information to reset my password and get my actual, honest-to-God SAT results. After a few deep, cleansing breaths, and a brief exercise in getting all of the expletives out of my system, I picked up the phone again.

Me: Are you still there?

Her: Yes. Do you have your score?

Me: Yes. I got a 1600.

Her: Oh, that’s full marks! Well done!

Me: …

At that point I half expected her to tell me my perfect score wasn’t good enough to waive me out of the class, but thankfully I was spared that, and I registered for the classes I actually wanted. Here, have a Woody Allen from my first drawing class:

About a year later, I moved to San Francisco to study on campus. While I prefer to deal with people in the classroom, I’d developed quite an aversion to dealing with them bureaucratically. So for my first semester on campus I decided to register through the online system, and avoid my advisor entirely unless I absolutely needed him. I got myself into my animation and illustration classes just fine, but when I went to sign up for an advanced creative writing class, I got a red flag. “Prerequisites not met,” it said, and forbade me from proceeding any further.

So I trundled over to my new advisor’s office, rehearsing polite ways of asking, “What the fuckity fuck is going the fuck on?”, and started a very familiar conversation about which Liberal Arts classes I was actually qualified to take. The issue, you see, was that I hadn’t actually waived out of LA 108, so I couldn’t take any more advanced classes until I had knocked that one off its perch. “But,” said I, “I did waive it! I sent in my SAT scores!” I remembered the conversation quite clearly: I still had postraumatic flashbacks sometimes. My advisor looked in all the places SAT scores were supposed to be, but alas, there they were not. I pointed out that I couldn’t possibly have taken the previous semester’s creative writing class without first taking LA 108 unless I had, indeed, waived out of the latter, but the system apparently didn’t have a button for “parse this in a way that actually makes sense”. My advisor’s hands were tied.

Eventually we reached a compromise. My advisor managed to override the system’s demands that I take LA 108, but without my SAT scores or a placement test result, he couldn’t get me out of the other two basic English courses I needed before I took the advanced creative writing class. Since I needed to register for something that day and couldn’t afford the supplies for a third studio class, I gritted my teeth and accepted it.

I won’t go into too much detail about the English class I ended up in. I’ve told the story many times, it’s quite long, and I’ll probably write it up in full some other time, so for now I’ll keep it brief. I entered the class with my expectations hovering somewhere around my ankles. By fifteen minutes in those same expectations had been lashed to the drill they use to get millenia-old ice samples in the Arctic, and driven down somewhere near the Earth’s core. At the first break I packed my stuff back into my bag, approached the teacher, and told him very politely that I hoped he wouldn’t take it personally, but I was going to go waive out of that class right then and there, and I didn’t expect I would see him after the break.

I am a girl of my word, so that’s exactly what I did. I went straight to the Liberal Arts office and insisted they throw every test they had at me; two hours later I was relieved of the obligation to take any English, math or science courses, and two days later I was sitting happily in the creative writing class I’d wanted to sign up for in the first place. Some of my best work came out of that class, and years later I still drop in to say hi to the teacher every now and again.