Jesus Tapdancing Christ. You know, I don't have a job anymore. I sit home all day writing and waiting for the phone to ring. I'm NOT that hard to get in touch with if you actually want to.

I've been mostly offline for the last few days because varying members of the VFS scholarship committee have supposedly been trying to get in touch with me since, as has been explained to me numerous times, they really want to get this wrapped up.

Except obviously they don't. I've now been playing phone tag (or more accurately that cruel variant of hide and seek where you go hide and they just don't look for you) for a fricking week now. Just for practice, allow me to recreate the experience for you at the level of detail you generally find in a manslaughter trial.

First there was Stephanie, who did give some indication of actually wanting to speak to me. She left the first message last Wed. night, while Elisa and I were out. I'm a finalist! Cool! She called again Thursday, missed me because again she called at like 8:30 our time, but said she'd try again at 1:00 pm my time on Friday. Well, Friday goes by without a call, and every time I call there I just get voice mail. We catch up late that night and Stephanie tells me they've had some catastrophic phone crash and the whole place has been cut off all day. Okay. That sort of thing used to happen at my old job from time to time, so that's credible I guess.

Stephanie's heading out of town next week (this week) but someone else will call me Monday because they really want to wrap this up. In fact they wanted to wrap it up several days ago at this point, but what can you do?

So Monday I sit around all day not going online or using the phone or really getting much of anything done because who knows when this unknown person will call. (answer: never)

Tuesday, same story. So Tuesday evening I call Scott, my regular admissions advisor, and ask him what's going on. He figures out that someone named Peter is supposed to have called me and said he'd get it done that day (Tuesday). Peter isn't around, but Todd goes ahead and puts me down for a 3:00 pm EST call Wednesday. Although he's sure it's not necessary as Peter will doubtless be coming back into the office at any moment and calling me because they really want to get this thing wrapped up.

So again today, nothing from VFS. In case it's not sufficiently clear from my tone, I am really starting to get pissed off. I haven't even officially been admitted yet, presumably because they're waiting to decide if I'm going to get this scholarship thing or not. But that may well end up deciding when my program would start, and planning issues are coming up fast. For example, Elisa has until the end of this month to get a refund if we're going to be leaving earlier and she can't take the class she signed up for when we figured we'd be moving in June.

Now they don't have to give me the scholarship thing. That's up to them. But I'm ditching my career, pretty much everything I know, moving across the continent and to another country and spending a year without a job. This isn't some fricking dude ranch vacation for me. I'm going "all in" here. I'm either going to succeed in this or I'm going to die trying. And I'm damn well going to insist that they take that seriously. A little professionalism wouldn't hurt either.

Of course it just takes a phone call to clear this up, and that's not that hard. And we're going to Vancouver anyway. So it's not like I'm already off the rails. But Scott, if your friends (thanks for offering to put me in touch with them BTW, I'd very much like to talk to them) can "vouch" for VFS in some way, maybe they'd better go ahead and do so, because I have to say, so far the experience doesn't seem to be living up to the web site.

On the other hand, after literally months of banging my head against Act III of the script I'm working on, I finally whacked it in the right spot and the whole thing fell into place. That's good.

Also, unofficial word is that the SciFi Channel has given a green light for six more episodes of Battlestar Galactica, which would be produced in... wait for it... Vancouver. So stuff's going on there, if I can just find someone capable of actually calling me when they say they're going to. It doesn't seem all that hard.