They're melting, melllllltinnnng!

Oh, what a world! It's three weeks from the big, October start here at Brown College, which means that it's time for some of my students to disconnect their phones, change addresses, be abducted by aliens, and otherwise vanish. Last week, I had two cousins who came to interview and inquire about our criminal justice program. After an hour of conversation, they both decided to pay their fifty-dollar application fees, and enroll. I arranged their subsequent financial aid visits, and bid them farewell. Neither of them showed up. No call, no smoke signals, no homing pigeon, nothing.

Now, fifty dollars is a lot of money to most people, including me. It buys pizza, rents movies, puts gas in my tank, buys T-bills, and looks dashing in my wallet, next to my collection of wrinkled singles. This inexplicable behavior has me baffled. Yesterday, I called the number they provided, reached someone who told me he was Michael Jackson, and that I had reached him in hell. This was initially amusing. I wondered what circle he was in.

A month ago I had twenty people on the books, count 'em. Some have understandably fallen away for financial reasons (seventy grand for a Bachelors degree is a tad steep for most), but I'm a perfectionist, and this hits me hard. I now have ten, which isn't terrible, but it's frustrating. I try to understand that I'm dealing with people who've traditionally had worse luck and have been dealt a crummy hand, and try to empathize. Still, when a student I've just cancelled due to inactivity calls me this morning and says his phone has been broken for two weeks, I'm miffed, more so with him.

Here's the thing about salesmen: I endure and prosper because of my ability to connect well with people, to earn their trust. When someone disappears, I take it like a blow to the gut, as a rejection of me, although realistically there are likely a myriad reasons that have nothing to do with their relationship to me. In fact, they probably stop keeping in touch, to not have to tell me in person, and to feel like they're letting me down.

I guess it helps to look back, and to remember how inept I was when I was in my early twenties, to cut them slack and give the remaining students, who have shown initiative, the utmost respect and adulation for starting school. Now, back to the phones.