Chinese Water Torture has nothing on Arena Scheduling

As you all know by now, from Sachi and Phillip's (I really hope I spelled that right, with two L's instead of one, because I wasn't sure so...) posts, we had Arena Scheduling today, or as I affectionately call it, Hell. And not like, movie-hell with a hot guy playing the devil, no I mean Dante's ninth circle-type hell.

My problem? I didn't have a math class, a second gym class (we're required to take two gym classes, each a semester long, each year), or any electives. So I skip down to the cafeteria, cheerily expecting it to take half an hour, tops, and that I would be free to go back to photo afterwards.

How freaking incredibly naive of me. The first thing I see as I walk into the cafeteria is many masses of bodies, seemingly forming blobs near different things. I look closer, the things they're around are the guidance counselors. But I breathe, still cheery, as some counselors seemed like they only had a few people around them. Well, except for that one, with about forty kids forming a sort of line from him or her. Now, to find my counselor...

And of course, just my luck, my counselor is the one with the forty kid line. I quickly got in line, and seconds afterwards, five more kids have joined behind me. And I wait, for the next hour and forty-five minutes. That's right, one hour, forty-five minutes. That's 105 minutes in line, only.

And then the kids in my line who only had to fix a missing gym class got taken care of early. They just walked off with a different counselor, practically taunting the rest of us still stuck in line because of missing a core class! And then there's the kids like Derek, who was only there because he didn't get an *elective* he wanted! Boo freaking hoo.

I guess other people were just as bored as me, because around 2:37, some guys in the next line over started singing. I'm talking like, barbershop quartet singing. Well, except there were only three of them, so I guess they were more of a trio. Strange, anyway.

The funny thing about being in line for nearly two hours? You start to bond with the people around you. Like the guy behind me had a conversation with me about the classes we were missing, even though I had absolutely no idea who he was. But then the conversation went something like this:

Random dude: Hey, are you taking honors chem?
Me: Yeah, is it hard?
RD: *shrugs* Not really, hey have you ever considered joining science team?
Me: ...er, no.
*awkward silence*

Eventually, I finally got to talk to my counselor. But then the news came that all of the department heads, who were supposed to sign our revised schedules, left. They just decided to go home, even there were still about 30 kids left who needed signatures. My counselor was pissed. But we went on to do the forms anyway.

Please, please, please don't make me ever go through that again.

<3 Helen