Relax, I’m not asking for your money. I am interested, however, if the dollars that you spend supporting UT in various ways (tuition, attendance at events, donations) are given of your own volition, or if they are coaxed out of you through cunning and deceit, like a wife coaxes her husband into admitting that her friends are hot or that she has a large ass so that she can use it as leverage against him later.
It is in the latter way that I feel our dear McCombs school of business goes about getting at my hard earned money, and later justifying this extraction as some sort of finder's fee for providing me with the degree that enabled me to earn said wages in the first place. The McCombs school has made it very easy to express your gratitude by stopping by here http://www.mccombs.utexas.edu/development/howtogive/ for a Ticketmaster-like shakedown.
However, the school is aware that my internet time, at a mere nine hours a day, is scarce and therefore precious. Diamond vs. water paradox, hello! This is the business school we're talking about. Knowing this, the b-school has imagiprenuered other ways to make it convenient for me, the graduate, to fund escalator repair and the installation of flat-screen tvs in the restroom that show announcements and ask me if I am cut or not.
The answer is phone calls. To my personal cellphone number. At night. Every six weeks.
Since I still have family in the Austin area, whenever I get a call from a 512 number I just assume one of them happened to change their phone number again to avoid a long string of match.com hookups that just won't let it go. But no. It's some freshman or sophomore holed up in a phone bank tunneled somewhere beneath the Burger King in the Atrium of the business school.
Imagine my surprise when a nubile young 18 year old girl or boy calls me before I've even submitted my credit card information! At first they ask me how I'm doing, if I like Dallas, and how awesome my generic accounting job is. Whenever somebody wastes my time, I like to flip the tables on them and start wasting their time.
So after I go on and on for 20 minutes about how I'm just now gaining my freshman fifteen, 10 years late, and how accounting is great but what I really want to do is direct, I finally take a long enough breath that they have a chance to ask me if now is good time to give a gift, say just $200, so that the business school can make much needed improvements. Improvements such as supplying disposable puppy potty mats to the students locked in the viet cong like call center where no, they cannot have it their way despite being oh so close to vaguely jack-in-the-box-esque tacos.
I always say no. I am a business major, but to me it seems at this point the only thing the business school needs more money for is to make it rain in the foyer of the Ford Career Center. If I'm going to give money to the academic side of the university, it will be to the school of social work or some other school that really needs it.
Mainly, UT gets money out of me through what I spend on attending athletic events, UT apparel, and parking tickets.
So what about you? Any Joe Jamails out there?