Thursday, November 18, 2010

A Little Annoying

Let me say up front that I HATE being late.

Many of you know that I am part Indian, part German. I joke that this means I either need to be 15 minutes early or it is a good day to fish.

Usually, especially for work, I channel my dad (the German half): being on time means being early.

If I am going to be late, I often prefer not to go at all.

So today area studies met at the Holocaust Museum. They made no arrangements for transportation for us, and we were originally scheduled to start there at 1 o'clock.

This is a problem for those of us who have language class until 12:30 at FSI. So the instructor agreed to make it 1:30.

Great. So we get there...I carpooled with my classmates. We were there 45 minutes early, so we had some lunch at the museum cafeteria (the fish chowder was good...the brownie, sadly, not so much. And it is really expensive! My classmates spent $30 for sandwhiches for the two of them). And then we were outside at the entrance where we were instructed to meet in plenty of time.

But our instructor took folks up early. And left no one downstairs. So we waited and waited...finally (once the line going in died down), we went in, found someone who knew of our group...then we had to find our way to a conference room that even employees of the museum didn't seem to know the location of.

We finally found them, but we were late.

The speaker was good, but really, they should have arranged for him to come to FSI, so we could have listened longer, or arranged transportation so we could have arrived as a group. Or left someone downstairs for those of us who were EARLY but apparently not early enough.

Grumble.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Based on my experience, Area Studies is the lamest of the lame no matter the area you are studying.

Andy said...

My lone field trip from FSI during language training was similarly frustrating. Professors getting there late, me getting there early, complicated carpooling and a mess of a situation that would have been better handled in the friendly confines of FSI.

Sara said...

Gaaaaah...when we went up, one guy said he was staying behind because there was one more group of students who were "racing" to get there. I guess I just assumed it was you guys. Sorry! :-/

And that's all I'm going to say about area studies class.