OF FEES AND BOOKS AND BOOKSTORE CROOKS

by Doug Harrison

As the editor of the student voice of UM-St. Louis, I guess I should offer you welcoming words of consolation and wisdom, impart to you, my fellow seekers of knowledge, invaluable secrets and priceless insights.

Thing is, I can't think of anything especially wise, invaluable or insightful.

I can tell you that if you don't pay the cashier, the cashier will send you this nasty note in the mail and drop you from all your classes.

But if you run up to the cashier's window and try to pay your overdue bill, the cashier will say, "No soup for you."

First you have to re-enroll before you can pay your bill, which seems strange to me. The cashier's office isn't satisfied with taking your money. Apparently, it must also teach you a lesson.

Anyway, to re-enroll, you must first go to the college from which your degree will be issued. Cashier's probably intends for you to engage in contemplative meditation during your long walk from Woods Hall to your college and back, during which time you should reflect on how miserably you've failed in the adult world and devise new, more mature methods of handling responsibility in the future.

Then you can go back to Woods and pay up.

The one benefit of all this is that you can get a parking sticker for free if you play your cards just right.

You see, cashier's doesn't drop anyone until shortly after the semester begins, so that you'll have already purchased your books and started completing work in your classes. Most students will hustle up and pay the bill if they think that good time and money they've already spent will go for naught.

But that also means, if you paid for parking the first time you enrolled, you already have your sticker. When you're summarily dropped from your classes, all fees, including parking, were erased. So when you re-enroll, just say no to parking. You'll already have your sticker, and you'll save yourself 50 bucks.

Of course, I would only assume this is how the process might work if one were to be dropped from one's classes.

I would never advocate such deplorable, near felonious activity.

If you want to talk about true felons, let's talk about the few instructors, and I stress that there are only a few, who require a $60 anthology for one eight-page story contained within it. Or worse yet, an instructor who requires a text that he or she has authored. (I've never actually taken a class where this has happened but have heard of it from a number of science majors.)

Make a really big scene if any of your instructors pull either one of these odious scams.

More important, thank the instructors who photocopy material for you or put material on reserve in the library for you to copy.

Even a couple hundred pages of photocopied material is cheaper than a retail book half that size. Your instructors could just as easily require the expensive text, and you'd be out more cash that you probably don't have.

Unless, of course, of you got your parking sticker for free.