If you attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States and you ever need to buy something from the copy shop in the Sewell Social Sciences building, prepare for one of the most frustrating experiences in your college/university career.

Back on the 6th of this month, I went to the copy shop to buy a reader for my sociological enterprise course. For those who are unfamiliar with university vocabulary, a “reader” is basically a huge collection of documents relevant to the course for which they were made; it’s more or less a replacement for a textbook with materials that the instructor or professor specifically picked out for his or her course.

Being the beginning of the semester, there were a lot of students waiting to purchase their own readers for their own classes, so I had to wait a while in line. Not a big deal, though, and not really frustrating, because I was checking and responding to emails and texting anyway and it didn’t matter that I was doing it while standing in line rather than standing outside the lecture hall for my following class waiting for the previous class to be dismissed.

After waiting about five minutes in line, I look up and notice a sign. It’s a tad bit too far away for me to be able to see it, so I wait another few minutes until I slowly make it closer and closer to the sign as I advance in line. Then I cross the point where I am able to read the sign, and notice that it says that credit or debit cards are not accepted.

I put on my -.- face and step out of line. My reader costs a little bit over $20 and I rarely ever carry over a dollar of cash in my wallet. I walk over to the closest no-charge ATM, which is in the building next door.

And of course, it decides that the 6th of September is an excellent day to break.

I decide that it’s acceptable to wait a few more days to purchase my reader, and add “go to working ATM” to my todo list.

Two days later (which would be two days ago), I grab my keys, iPod Touch, and laptop bag to go to an ATM on my way to class. When I arrive at the ATM, I notice that my wallet is missing. The best part is that when I went to grab my keys, they were sitting right on top of my wallet, but for whatever reason, I decided not to grab my wallet as well.

So I went another day without my reader.

Finally, yesterday, I grabbed both my keys as well as my wallet before going to class to stop by the ATM. I successfully withdrew $25 from the ATM. After attending my morning classes, I went to the copy shop in the social sciences building during my lunch break to finally purchase my reader.

I arrive and it’s closed.

Resisting the urge to just hop over the counter, find my reader, and process the transaction myself, I read the sheet of paper stuck to the wall to discover that the copy shop is closed every day during lunch hours.

Whoever decided it’s a good idea to close during lunch hours when everyone has free time to stop by and purchase their readers should get fired.

Yes, I did eventually manage to buy my reader a few hours later.

To top off the frustration, it’s not even three-hole punched so I can’t even put it in my binder without hole punching a couple hundred pages myself eight sheets at a time with a hand-operated three-hole puncher.