In which I expose my ignorance of Things Financial

I have mentioned that I'm not good with numbers, haven't I? Yes, I thought I had. My anumia rarely rears its head in any significant way that I can't work around. It does affect my ability to process statistics and financial information, but I can usually work around it in conversations by nodding and making "um-hmm" sounds, or by just letting my eyes glaze over and turn to the next item on the page if I'm reading. But every once in awhile, I get caught.

If I were good with numbers, I'd have been hovering over my various and sundry retirement accounts, fluffing them here, turning them there, playing with ratios of stocks and bonds and following the S&P 500 and Warren Buffet's pronouncements like the words of deities. But no. I take a job, I sign up for the 401(k) or 403(b) or 98.6(q) or whatever it is, then when I move on to the next job, I repeat the same process.  I've gone from job to job, leaving a trail of abandoned clumps of retirement dollars here and there like empty bottles of Diet Dr Pepper. Not a worry in the world. Again, until I get caught.

Like when I try to wrest money from a retirement account to pay for paralegal school.

I'd been receiving statements from three financial concerns for awhile: "Cotton Swab," "Stereo," and "Aunt Cliff." (I'm doing the best I can with pseudonyms, okay? Geez.) When I decided I needed to raid my nest egg, I dug out the most recent mailings from each, and tried to figure out who was who. Stereo is handling my current pension money from the City of Large. Cagney and Lacey had told me that I could borrow money from my retirement account and pay myself back later, but only if it was the one connected with my current job. Let's see: try to figure out who in the Large HR department to talk to, talk to them, get whatever forms I need, get them filled out and money paid to me, all in a relatively short space of time? No thanks. People have gone into Large City Hall on simpler errands than that and never been seen again.

That left Cotton Swab and Aunt Cliff. Puzzling over the statements, I saw that my money with Aunt seemed to be in two separate accounts from two different jobs I'd had that used their company. Why hadn't everything gone into one pot? The money was all from me. It's for my retirement. Why split it up? This looked potentially complicated. On to the next statement. I had a big clump of money in the tender care of Cotton Swab, and despite the recent market downturns, it was doing pretty well, actually. So I decided that the simplest course would be to roll all of it over to Aunt, take out enough to cover my classes and books at Major University, and go on my merry way.

Poking around Swab's website, I noticed several mentions of rolling over money "to qualified accounts." What the heck did that mean? I thought I'd better call Aunt and see if one of my accounts was "qualified," and while I was chatting, find out what she needed to do to deal with my incoming dough, besides rubbing her hands together in gleeful anticipation. I called. Got put in a queue. And waited. And waited. And ... you get the idea.

Allrighty then. Time to call Swab. My first bad vibe came when I got a recorded announcement that said, in essence, "The person you're about to talk to Wants to Sell You Something So S/He Gets A Commission." Oh brother. The fast-talking Noo Yawker on the line had no patience with my hesitant description of what I wanted to do. He zipped through a list of the stuff Swab needed to know, winding up with, "Do you even know how they want the check made out?" When I said, no, and that I hadn't been able to get through to ask that question, he shot back,"Well are they the kind of people you want to do business with?" Since I hadn't had the opportunity to be condescended to in person like this guy had so ably done, I couldn't answer that question off the top of my head, so I said I'd have to call him back.

It looked like I would have to deal with the unreachable on one hand, and the insufferable on the other. What fun.

Long story short (too late) I finally reached a very patient person at Aunt Cliff who, after I trotted out the metaphor of leaving a trail of retirement accounts behind me wherever I go, quickly got the picture, translated my needs into FinancialSpeak, and got to work. Not only did he walk me through Aunt's forms, he placed a conference call to Swab (!), and got a less-snarky person to walk me through Swab's forms (!!!). Now that's the kind of people I want to do business with. Thirty minutes later, I had two sets of forms ready. In a week, my tuition money was sitting in my savings account. Another week, and I briefly and reverently held a Very Large Check in my hands long enough to pop it into a FedUp envelope and ship it off to Aunt Cliff. An email assured me it had been received and deposited into one of my accounts.

I sighed a huge sigh of relief, paid my tuition to Major University, and waited with bated breath for news of the program's start date.

What could possibly - yeah, you're way ahead of me.

Hoops, and the jumping therethrough.

"What a day this has been
"What a rare mood I'm in
"Why it's almost like being
"in THE SEVENTH CIRCLE OF HELL!"
-- with apologies to Alan Jay Lerner

If I ever decide to go back to school yet again, please, somebody: bash me upside the head with a shovel. Okay, if that's too violent for you, at least tell me -- nay, order me -- to burn all of my transcripts and start from zero. Take English 101, embrace Computer Literacy for Complete Idiots, and enter joyfully the classroom wherein Bonehead Math is taught. Because doing otherwise involves pain and aggravation on the order of crawling naked across broken glass through flaming walls of rabid rattlesnakes.

We re-join this comedy of transcript errors where we left it yesterday: on the doorstep of the Advising Office. I got there shortly after 8, and there were already several people ahead of me. After puzzling over which box to check under "What do you need today," I settled in for a relatively brief wait. Right when "Bucket List" was getting to the part of the movie dealing with the actual bucket list, my vibrating coaster went off, and off I went to see an Advisor.

Actually, there was a group of three of us to talk with Ms. Advisor One, all with prior college classes, but with different problems. The woman who was going to study Child Development had a lot of trouble navigating the online registration process. The other woman, who was enrolling in some kind of health care program, had questions about withdrawn classes on her transcript. And then there was me: the big ol' problem child.

If there's one thing I'm going to have to learn (above and beyond math skills I've long forgotten, and, once re-learned, I will never use again) it's to shut up and let people do their jobs. It was probably a good thing that I kept correcting Advisor One, who was determined to type "1997" instead of "1977" in relation to my transcripts. That 20 year discrepancy might have caused trouble. But interrupting Advisor Two and telling him that Advisor One had already checked the Database That Holds All Class Descriptions and hadn't found mine was not so good. He paused, looked at me, and said, very very politely, "I'm looking up the file with your transcript in it to print it out." Oh. Sorry. Shutting up, sir.

After disentangling my foot from my tonsils, I left the hallowed hall of Advisement having learned the following things:

1. Nobody knows why the transcript-analyzing person skipped over my Freshman English class. An email was sent asking that another look be taken so as to give me proper credit.

2. Advisor One thought Advisor Two would be able to decide whether my Government and Speech classes were acceptable substitutes for Hoth's required courses. Advisor Two said, no, he couldn't, not without a copy of the relevant descriptions from my Alma Mater's 1977 catalog. Which I have to hunt down and provide to him. And while I was at it, I'd better get the description of the English class, just in case. (Shouldn't that be his job? I'll do it, but ... c'mon.)

3.  There was no point in taking the computer literacy test, because the results wouldn't matter. The Paralegal program requires its students to take the basic computer skills class, or take a CLEP test to prove they don't need to.  Taking the CLEP test requires visits to three different offices to collect signatures (shades of service sorority rush!), payment of a $25 fee, and the purchase of the software needed to take the test. Total cash outlay: about $50. Total aggravation factor: a plus 6. Not to mention that I might not pass the test, and therefore would be out the portrait of President Grant, and still have to pay for, and take, the class.

4. Not only is there no way out of taking the required Algebra class, I must (the actual words Advisor One used were "I strongly suggest") take a math skills placement test - a.k.a. the math portion of "Accuplacer". This is a non-timed test that starts easy and gets harder and harder until the program decides you've reached your level of incompetence and stops torturing you. For me, this should be right around question 4, or whenever they start asking about percentages.  You think I'm kidding? In my senior year of college, when everybody was getting their GRE results, we'd compare scores. I opened my envelope and saw that I'd achieved the 91^st percentile in Language, the 98^th percentile in Analytical Reasoning, and [drum roll, please] the 37^th percentile in Math. "What does that mean," a friend asked me. I replied, "It means that -- um ... ...uh -- seventy-something percent of the people who took the test did better than me in Math. What? Why are you all rolling around on the floor and laughing?"

So my tasks are laid out for me: call my undergraduate institution and ask for course descriptions, figure out when to fit that computer course into my schedule, and start studying up on how to divide fractions, plot equations, and answer questions like "32 is 40% of what number?"

I just broke out in hives.