In Continuum.

The finals, everybody dreads it. Nobody is going to tell you "Wow, I am so looking forward to the finals, not because of the holidays afterwards but because of how I can truly test my knowledge!" Nobody sane enough in the head is going to say that anytime soon, which is also why we burn the midnight oils and drink from the midnight coffee mugs just to pull ourselves through this dreadful period of time. And as if the pressure to get better results than before is not enough, something called the "Registration of Classes" has to barge in like a cocky high school football team leader into the cafeteria, looking for trouble. After the finals, it is our final hurdle before anything officially begins. It is where we dictate our lives for the next semester, how the timetable is going to be planned out. Because that is probably the only aspect of a semester that in within total control of yourself, the only part of the next semester you are going to put yourself through without the possibility of screwing it up. Besides, the timetable does have a lot of effects on our morale, one way or another. Someone working a four day week is going to be infinitely higher in terms of his morale than somebody else working a six day week. It's all relative, and it is real.

We, as students, know that for a fact. We know that we cannot afford to mess our timetables up. Every hour of difference on the timetable makes a lot of differences, and a single day off is a single day without school - which is always good. Don't get me wrong, I love school. I love hanging around with my friends in the lounge, just sitting around on the sofas and having nice little chats even though the classes have ended. But a day away from school in the comfort of my own home, that is definitely something I am going to look forward to in the next semester. All the students know that to a larger or smaller degree, the timetable is going to help us one way or another, which is also why people actually place more emphasis on the registration more than the finals. At least for me, I find that booking my classes online is probably one of the most stressful events I have even been through.

The thing about registration is that everybody is given the same time to register, given the same timetable, and everybody - which includes about three hundred students - has an equal chance of scoring the classes that they want. And as for me, I am as ordinary as an ordinary person get. I like what the public likes, I am conventional in that way. If a certain combination of classes guarantees a free day off in the week, I am going to strive for it - no matter what. I am going to get that combination of classes like a leopard after a wild boar, or a single stem of fire looking for the end of the rope. Nothing is going to come in my way this time around, at least not the incident that happened in the last semester when I didn't get the classes I wanted. I ended up with three morning classes, and we all know how morning classes tend to make us all suicidal maniacs. That is also why when Deuel told me about the registration being on the third of December, I was dead set on getting my combinations just right on that very day. Nothing was going to go wrong on that day, and everything was going to go according to my plans. I expected all three hundred students in the cohort to rush for the school's website at the exact same time, and I was determined to breakthrough the crowd to get to my goal.

The third of December came, and the hour drew closer and closer as the lot of us settled ourselves in Kerri's house to wait for the registration to begin. Six o'clock was the designated time, but the congestion over at the website could already be felt. Pages were being loaded at speeds slower than a 56k modem, and that posed as a problem to the lot of us as we waited anxiously for the last minutes of the hour to come to a close. We made our little final countdowns in our heads, and when the selections became available, our hearts raced at a hundred miles per hour, and our fingers went bonkers on the mouse. Clicking away at the classes we desired, most of us managed to get the classes that we wanted. Kania however, didn't managed to do so because the classes that she wanted were snatched up within a minute or so. That was how hungry the people on that day was, simply because there is a Saturday lecture and everybody wanted to avoid it - at all costs. We were just about to settle down with our selections when Shen flew out of Kerri's room, screaming at the top of his voice that he couldn't select his classes. A few phone calls were made until the phone lines were completed jammed, and we found out about the technical glitch that occurred in the system. All those who are supposed to take NTR next semester didn't have any options when it came to their class selections. So the registration was halted, everything came to a stop, and all our previous selections were completely erased.

We were pissed off, we were very pissed off. We were frustrated simply because of the amount of time we actually devoted to registering for our classes, instead of studying for CSE that happened in the very next day. We knew that such things couldn't have been prevented, and that shit happens on a daily basis. But it still bugged us - at least for me - for the fact that I managed to get my perfect combinations and yet, everything went down the toilet in a matter of seconds, just because some IT personnel in the school failed to do prior checks to their system. They could have done a lot of things before the dead line, but I guess even more things could have been left out in the process. So the lot of us studied for the paper for the very next day, and waited for the notification of the next registering date available. 

It came two days later that informed us of the registration on the sixth of December, at five in the afternoon this time around. This time, the lot of us were fully prepared for the onslaught of online traffic. Strategy number one involves the crew - or, my friends and I - to equip ourselves with the necessary equipments during the registration. Necessary equipments included our own laptops, power adaptor just in case your laptop runs out of power halfway through the registration, and of course a lightning fast Internet connection. Strategy number two involves opening up three tabs in an internet browser, with every tab using a different server of the same website. Our school's website has three servers all together to handle the heavy traffic, and what we did was to open three tabs in the browser to book a place in all three servers at the very same time. Other than that, everything was pretty much set for the second registration to occur, and we were just sitting in Kerri's bedroom on Thursday evening, waiting for the registration to begin and the semester to come to an end. It was the last burden, our last hurdle before the great plunge. We needed the registration to end in order to mark the beginning of our holidays, and the last minutes of the sixteenth hour felt like eternity.

It was five in the afternoon, the website kick started. All three hundred students must have tried to log in at the very same time. Page errors started to pop out everywhere, and nobody was able to access anything. We clawed at our skins and tore our hair out as we waited desperately for a certain form of miracle, a sign that the page error would fix itself if we pull our enough of our hairs. But the page error kept showing up after our registrations, and everything just went haywire for the longest time as we waited desperately for our selections to appear on screen, the screen that shows your confirmed selections. A lot of vulgarities were being yelled in Kerri's room that afternoon, and even more phone calls were made to the school's administration. Pages didn't load, selections were not confirmed, and there were too many speculations in the air for us to calm down at all. The school departments weren't helping either, because they were pushing responsibilities to the IT team, a bunch of people we've never even heard of. We had a growing suspicion that the IT team doesn't even exist, and it was a bunch of people created out of thin air, just so that the phone lines won't be flooded like they were that evening. A lot of angry voices must have went through a lot of receivers, which comes to show just how many pissed off students there were that evening. Then the bomb was dropped on the portal, something about yet another dead for us to register. This time, without an apology whatsoever.

It really frustrated us this time around, because we had so many plans canceled just for this delay in registration. Block catching was dropped because of this out-of-nowhere registration, and a lot of other dates and dinner plans were postponed or canceled just to accommodate this event. After all, we all agreed that class registration is more important than anything else, and it also marked the end of the semester. But the fact that everything went haywire all over again on the last day of our semester, pissed us off even more. It meant that we weren't going to have fun on our last day, and the stress was merely postponed to another day altogether. It also meant that my meeting with Krishna was rudely canceled as well, and everything basically just fell apart on the last day of school, save for the amazing Dim Sum dinner at Desker Road. We were dismayed by the end of the day, and another notice was posted on the portal - this time, with an apology. But of course, they apologized, or else the school would have been burned down as a result. If not by anybody else, me.

Yesterday was the other day that the school prepared for us to register. Very cleverly this time, they opened up a timeframe between five to six in the afternoon for us to register. That is to say, you wouldn't know when they were going to open up the website for registration, which would also mean that the impatient students would lose out if they were not going to be willing to spend an hour refreshing their web browsers. After fifteen minutes of mindless refreshing, the lot of us finally managed to get into the system and select our classes, and I managed to secure my classes for the third time in a week - a stressful ordeal I am glad, that I survived. However, the same cannot be said about a lot of my classmates, the ones who were a little unlucky this time around.

A few of us managed to get the same classes, but weren't so lucky when it came to that dreadful Saturday morning class. Imagine everybody staying up late on Friday night simply because it is Friday night, and there you are tucking yourself in because you have to wake up earlier tomorrow for school on a bloody Saturday. It's confinement in the army all over again, or weekend guard duty like the good old days. Only this time, you can't sell your classes to some money hungry of yours, which sucks. Other unlucky souls didn't even manage to pick up any classes they desired at all, and ended up in all the wrong classes. Some of my friends even forgot about the registration simply because they were out somewhere, doing anything but. 

But I guess, what is done is done - or what wasn't done, wasn't done either. We just got to roll with the punches and move on like that. At least we still have each other in school, still have random little gatherings in the lounges, and not to mention the holiday trips at the end of every semester. I do hope that this timetable chaos will not segregate anymore of our already dire friendships. In the mean time, I am in full support of Deuel's father to call up the school's administration to lodge a complaint of some kind. Of course, and for Jonno to call up whoever in charge and ask him to go fuck himself. It's cheap. In fact, it is real cheap. But I guess when we are this disappointed as 'customers' of the school, it becomes only fair.