Hell, Part 1: The TeleBears Inferno

TeleBears (as defined by UrbanDictionary)

1. What UC Berkeley students are forced to endure before every semester.

2. The shittiest, slowest, most outdated and least logical website on the World Wide Web. With programming carried over from when it was a telephone service (hence the name), all your info will be lost if you hit the back button, and its inner workings are a mystery to all. Although its stated purpose is to help students register for classes, what it really does is cause lots of stress, anger, and frustration.

(http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=TeleBears)

 

With a month to go until my flight, and still up to my ears in admin, it was time to tackle UC Berkeley’s online enrolment system, otherwise known as TeleBears. The deceptively appealing name lured me into a false sense of security, and I first logged on reassuring myself that the process couldn’t be that much worse than the UEA Portal.

New Berkeley students are currently going through the Phase 1 of online enrollment for the ‘fall’ term. In this first phase, students must choose two upper-division modules within their major to study in the fall term. Each upper-division module is worth four units. Having signed up for eight units’ worth of study in your major, the enrollment passes into Phase 2, where students make up the remainder of their thirteen units of study (the minimum requirement) with modules drawn from courses outside of the major. 

That, at least, was my grasp of the matter. 

What I didn’t reckon for was the eight-hour time difference between California and London would also apply online. I couldn’t understand this: surely a selling point of the internet is that you can access it at all hours? On the first day I tried repeatedly to sign onto the server, only to be told that ‘official opening hours’ ran from eight a.m. to midnight on weekdays and midday to midnight on Saturdays and Sundays. Returning at eight (two p.m local time) I was stopped from logging on by a notice telling me the site would be ‘down for maintenance’ between eight and nine every weekday morning and that I should try again in an hour. An hour later I realised none of the codes in the module catalogue actually translated across to the TeleBears webpage, so the notes I’d made on module choices were useless to me. And apparently I couldn’t sign up for a single course before I’d taken an ‘AC level writing test’. Which took place last April. Oh, and I owed them $100 in registration fees. Despite the fact that I hadn’t been able to register for anything. 

After slowly tearing out and eating my hair over the course of the next two weeks I eventually managed to enrol on a course in ‘New Fiction and Journalism’, and a poetry module which refuses to appear in the online domain due to the absence of some sort of tutor-based code. I can only assume that poets are reclusive on that side of the Atlantic as well. Having made up eight of the thirteen units required for this term, I returned to TeleBears in a state of relative calm- only to be barred once more by glaring red words telling me: 

‘FALL 2012 APPOINTMENT TIME HAS NOT YET STARTED FOR THIS PHASE. PLEASE COME BACK ON JULY 20^TH 2012.’

[Fig 1. Berkeleygirl's state of mind]

 

In that moment I considered putting my foot through the laptop screen; but decided to go for my visa appointment instead. There was no way it could be more stressful than signing up for classes.