Time slows to a halt as we anxiously log in to our CalCentral for the first time in a long time. We click on the “My Academics” section as we decide to ignore the 14 notifications that attempt to inform us that we owe the school $35,214 and our future first-born child. The page loads to reveal that our Phase I time for fall is 9 a.m. on May 1, 2024. Looks like it’s time to start selling our kidneys.
Before you admonish us for selling our internal organs, we urge you to consider that drastic times call for drastic measures. A Phase I time in the next century is a guarantee that the first 15 weeks of our next semester will be spent on the waitlist. The only way for us to escape the turmoil of juggling five classes in hopes of eventual enrollment is for us to start playing dirty.
We would eat all of the fortune cookies in the world if it gave us a shot at a “Freaky Friday” situation with someone who has a Phase I time in the first week. We would happily slide a regents’ scholar a cool 20 bucks to trade Phase I times with us lowly plebeians. Heck, we would slide them our entire savings account (all $45 of it) in exchange for their prime registration time. We would give them every penny to our name and promise to do their laundry for a year if it meant we could avoid the beginning-of-the-year shuffle. You know the shuffle we’re talking about: that unfortunate dance we do at the start of the year when we find ourselves unable to get off any waitlists and must resort to adding six DeCals to our schedule.
In the event that these hard bargains are not enough to allow us to register sometime in this decade, we’ll have to resort to supernatural measures. You can bet your bottom dollar, or rather one of our 45, that we’ll be wishing on every four-leaf clover we can find that our Phase I time will miraculously improve. We’ll fish change out of the fountain on Sproul just to toss it right back into the fountain with registration-related wishes. We’ll rip out all of our eyelashes to wish that the one course we need for graduation remains open. Just for good measure, we’ll also hunt ladybugs within an inch of extinction for additional luck.
