Heading into the second half of the semester, it was time last week to submit bids for Winter term courses. Six classes, ranked in order of preference, strategically reranked and fretted over to optimize the odds of a sufferable professor or subject, and – most importantly – submitted to Mrs. Burns promptly at noon on Monday.

Except that last part didn’t happen. In the early afternoon I received a very gentle call from one of the law school administrators patiently reminding me that their office wasn’t yet in receipt of my course listing and that also, really, I should get my shit together.

Of course I vowed not to make the same mistake when it came time to submit bids for Spring courses. Constant vigilance. A list masterfully tailored to my personal sufferability metrics, and submitted before morning coffee.

So you can imagine my self-disgust when yesterday the very same thing happened again. (Wish I could insert an eye-roll emoji here). Again the call, the kind attention, again sliding into the course-selecting randomizer at the eleventh hour… So turns out all’s well, I will in fact be enrolled next semester, but the whole thing got me thinking a bit about the role of the kindly lady on the other end of the line.

Any school administrator’s got a challenging job, naturally: shepherding the youth of America through the system while said youth’s attention is diverted to lab write-ups, networking, finishing readings, etc. Or Tinder or what have you. More difficult still at Harvard, I’m sure, where half the students have some kind of a complex and all of ‘em have an ego wider than Widener.

But law school must be uniquely challenging, because it’s the one school where the egotistical attention-diverted students were selected specifically for their argumentativeness. I can absolutely see any number of peers of mine citing the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and claiming they weren’t provided adequate Notice about the submission deadline. So I don’t know, perhaps propounding on my appreciation will help me to not inconvenience them next time course listings are due. But something tells me I’ll likely find myself in receipt of another pleasant, emburrasin’ phone call.