Phone Phun (now with emails!)

[fireheart]

So I've been working for a correspondence college at the moment and I'm basically first point of call for that department.
What doesn't help however, is that on the website for the same correspondence course, the department that I'm in is listed as a department that "Anyone" can call if they don't know what course they want to enrol in. (The department I'm in handles basic education ie student needs training on how to actually read important signs.) So as a result, we seem to be a dumping ground for a number of odd calls. Here's a short summary of them:

-I wound up getting no less than FOUR calls the other day all regarding the GED program we offer (basically students can complete their GED through the college-we don't handle this and it's made very clear to the students when they enrol) and it wasn't that they were querying about the course, they actually wanted help with a particular aspect! Even the lady who handles the GED stuff kept wondering why I was getting her calls.

-One guy called this morning doing a background check for a student. OK, seems standard. Except the student was doing an ACCOUNTING course. While the GED stuff is more understandable, this was WAY off base and needless to say the guy got transferred quick smart.

-I got a message from a student about a topic that we did not have. Further digging revealed that she'd previously completed one of our courses and had moved onto another course. The topic she was querying about was not one of ours.

-One student sent me an email saying "As requested, I am emailing my teacher." OK, fair enough, but this came through to the "group inbox" (ie students first point of email contact is a generic group address, not an individual staff member) and did not have any information beyond his name. 0.o

-My personal favourite was the girl I got today: seemed sweet, except that she'd called the number that took her to our department when she needed another one. The kicker was that a) she'd NEVER done one of our courses previously, b) she left a message in our voicemail and c) you actually do hear "Thank you for calling OUR department" instead of "Thank you for calling <department she needed>" when you leave a message. Cue look from me and a very confused look from the lady that I delivered the message to later!

-Not a sucky guy, just....oy. He called up initially stating that he was having some issues using his resources. Sweet guy, I took a message and asked his regular teacher (all the students in our department are allocated a set teacher as opposed to other departments where students aren't allocated a set teacher) if they knew what was happening with this particular resource. Turns out it was that when we wrote the resource, we didn't change it to one that you could enter data into so it's basically like an ebook instead of a "form" like it should be. The resource guy who wrote the unit offered to call the student back despite not being his regular teacher and did so. The guy kept him talking for 20 minutes. Nice guy, just blathered on and on and on. I even had trouble trying to find out what the hell the guy actually wanted at first! (he blathered about autocorrect then about calculators, I had to get him to walk me through his problem to actually get somewhere).
The kicker? his regular teacher asked me who the student was. When I told her, she basically 'ed.

[skeptic53]

More than 30 years ago I worked at the University of <State> as an academic student advisor. One fall an older student (about 40) came in to get help picking his courses, he was changing careers and wanted a new degree. He had moved from the opposite coast, bought a house in town. He wanted to major in Ecology. This was not a major that U. of <State> offered, it was offered at <State> State University. He didn't need to do any intro courses, his prior degree covered those, he just needed courses in his major. He was livid, he was going to sue, etc etc. We pulled his application, under "intended major" it said "Biology", which we offered. We also pulled proof that he had received a course catalog in the mail, which lists the majors and courses offered. He still was implacably furious. There was nothing we could do, but fortunately the two universities are only 50 miles apart. He could commute to the other school until he could sell his house. He was lucky, in the neighboring state the two similar schools are 287 miles apart!