Room 101

The following article was written in 2009, as part of my creative writing portfolio at Uni.

“Please could you have your customer reference number, formally known as your art ID, and your secret answer ready with you?”

Since becoming a student I have discovered one of life’s most infuriating timewasters. There are people who are employed simply to know the answers to questions and then do their up most to avoid giving you this information by all means necessary. Such people work for a company known to be organised and unreliable. Even a family friend, who used to be a bank manager, cringed at the mention of them. They go by the name of Student finance.

This year their name has been plastered over the news as record breaking numbers of applicants apply for funding. Issues overflow as the phone lines get busier and busier. Late or even lost payments caused students, in the last few months, crazy amounts of stress and worry as food runs out and places or people to borrow off begin to turn out their empty pockets. This however has been a pattern experienced by students not only in the past year but in many years before and though the system has supposedly changed (for the better) from local authorities to national, the service is still rubbish.

One thing I don’t understand about this company is that they are a loan/ grant providing service to equip students with money to pay such things as phone bills and food. Yet when you need to contact them regarding a problem with a payment not going through, you have to pay for a premium rate phone call that could last in some cases up to an hour! Em, one question Mr Student Finance... how do you expect me to pay for this exactly?

Ok I need to, at this point, make one thing clear. The Student Loans Company are fabulous, despite some smaller grants in the past years, they are keeping me above the water and so I don’t think it wise to bite the hand that feeds. However, they need to work out this delegation problem because clearly Student Finance England are not the best people for the job. How hard can it be? If the jobcentre are coping in a recession with the rush of people running for jobseekers allowance at a weeks’ notice, surely student finance can get its act together and process some forms when given a month or two in advance!

This task, I am sure, is not impossible but I will praise the day when I am greeted by a single helpful person on the other end of that blasted phone. Someone to tell me that I won’t need to wait “3 to 5 working days” before they know what the problem is. Someone who confesses that the paper work they keep sending back is really of no use and that they can, at a click of a button, authorise said payment and put an end to all the hassle. That day will be one to go down in history: that day you will see me skip merrily round campus, singing from the roof tops, reassured that humanity does still own a gram of common sense.

Until that day, I propose one simple remedy for this thrombosis, this blockage in the system. May we PLEASE drop kick Student Finance England into room 101.