But are you calling my mom a pikey?

I'M STARTING BUSINESS SCHOOL in New York next year. I was thrilled with the school early on in the application process (hence my decision to apply early), and was, for obvious reasons, quite happy with the school when they decided to accept me.

Since then, it's been downhill. A meager financial aid package. A confusing website. Different ID names and passwords for everything. Systems and departments that don't speak to each other. Surprise charges. Through all of this, though, the saving grace has been all of the unhelpful and unpleasant people, people who treat me as if my confusion, my very existence, was a chafe on their soul.

Today was the latest in a growing list of indignities. I called the Off Campus Housing Office (because I have no chance of getting university housing), and asked a simple question: What paperwork should I bring with me on my apartment search?

From the beginning, the woman was a terror. She all but made fun of me for thinking I could find an apartment in New York with an August 1 move in date in early July. When I asked her the best time to start looking, she suggested three or four weeks from now. When I pointed out that four weeks from now was, in fact, August 1st, she told me tersely that the rental market was tight (really? in New York?), and suggested that I give myself two or three weeks to find a place. Ignoring the fact that two or three weeks from three or four weeks from now would be the middle of August, I told her that I had a full time job in another city, and that I would need to find something with a tad more alacrity.

I could almost hear her disinterested shrug.

"You may not find a place then."

I was flabbergasted. This woman's job was to help students find off campus housing, and here she was telling me that I would begin classes without a place to live. In effect, she was saying that she couldn't give two shits about the underlying purpose of her job, her sole reason for coming to work every day, the very reason her position, her entire department, existed. She was suggesting that I begin at her school (the honor for which I am paying upwards of $140K) living on the streets.

She must have taken my silence as some sort of grudging acquiesce to her flawless job performance.

"I need to go," she said. "The office closes at five o'clock."

It was 5:02.

It was then that I began to imagine having a Lauren Cooper conversation.

"I ain't bovvered," I would say.

"Excuse me?"

"Do I look bovvered?"

"Sir, the office is closed."

"But I ain't even bovvered though."

"What do you..."

"Are you calling me fat?"

Instead I said, in my fake happiest voice, "Well, gosh, thanks so much! You've been such a big help. I'll be in touch from my lean-to shantytown!"

Catherine Tate - Lauren Cooper Gets Murried

"I ain't even bovvered tho."