I’m having very stressful deep thoughts about this weight I all of the sudden dropped on my own shoulders. Impending student loan payments, meaning this very fine November I have to start repaying my private loans, and shortly there after in the lovely month of December start paying my federal loans. Alright. No big deal, I knew I had loans, I knew I had to repay them, I knew I had six months. Oh! There it is, the slip, the catch, the glitch! Six months? But, November, that’s, well by gosh that’s next month!

Deep breath. Turns out after I opened some mail last night I discovered that my payments are a lot sooner than I anticipated because I assumed I had six months from the time of my declared “Withdrawn” status.

In this fine situation that we’re currently in that can best be described as the calm before the storm, I have no idea what to make of all of this and its relation to me. To the lovely banks of America, and coincidentally, Bank Of America Ô , Six months ago started in May, when I was last taking classes at the University of Connecticut. As I call the offices with my big long epic story as to why I’m not going to school anymore, basically, my novel in a phone call. (haha)

As an automated woman answers my call with the same tone she’s repeated to hundreds of thousands of other phone calls, I have to enter all sorts of numbers and birth dates and zip codes and I realize to them I’m just a bunch of numbers, a serial code, a product needing to mature, and investment waiting to be backed.

My mind drifts to a scene of me, and 50,000 people, at least, ahead of me, stretched across a barren round earth with the light looms brightly just slightly at the edge, to where I’m oriented in going. In my hand is a long thin strip of paper, with a multi-digit number splayed across its surface in black ink. What am I waiting in line for? What’s at the top and who has that?

The real shock comes when I’m finally directed to go to “the AES website at www.thisquestionis.moreeasily/answered.here” or, “wait on the line for a very extended period of time because there are thousands of other people calling with the same exact story as you that they just decided to drop out right before school started too, tough shit”.

Considering the beauty of speaker phone, I put the phone down and logged on to the website, just to humor them. I took the deferment eligibility quiz, (after spending ten minutes signing up for yet another account with yet another password with yet another 5 security questions to remember the next time I need these people and forget) very quickly getting a feel for my status when, on the first question,

I can’t even check one of the possible options. Now, to humor myself, I finish taking the quiz anyway, hoping 1 out of 5 each time was pretty good. It wasn’t. Instantly, through a series of electrical impulses and computer generated programs based on a series of seven arbitrary questions related to status and not profile only, I was declined, ever so politely with a red X. Denied, Next.

And I realized that’s the issue with our credibility system. There’s a vast amount of generalized profiling going on in order to credit or discredit someone for their needs upon one another. On a vast scale, at the company level, in the case of these banks when it comes to loans, (really any kind of large scale management, centralized management, etc.) the only way the people at the bottom get a chance is if they fit a certain, narrowed level of selection while the rest of their customers have to find some other way to come up with the means they don’t have either. Unfortunately in this economy, it’s not just the disabled or the military that can’t pay their debts. It’s a vast amount of middle class, small business, majority America that pay for anything, because the network of wealth that sustained that genre of people in the past has now been sucked up by huge corporations amongst a small, by comparison, ensemble of men.