Here’s Hoping They Wash Out — FAST

Where I live, it takes twelve weeks of training to become a police officer and fourteen weeks of training to become a border officer. There is also an optional two-year college course for each to prepare you for the job, dive deeper into the criminal code, increase your fitness, and get your nonviolent crisis certificate. I am currently in the optional Border Services course, which shares a first year with the optional police course. I am required to wear a uniform (cargo pants and a button-up collared shirt with the program crest on the sleeves) three days a week.

The first day of classes was orientation, which meant we spent the day in one classroom and were introduced to the program and what it had to offer. I was fresh out of high school and was very nervous about my first day, so I packed everything I could imagine needing — a pencil case, a laptop, several notebooks, lined paper, and feminine hygiene products — and got ready for orientation. 

I sat at a table with five other girls who also looked my age and was surprised that they had all only brought their purses while I had packed a full backpack. At first, I was a bit embarrassed that I had misunderstood what was needed for the day.

Then, the orientation started. 

Professor: “All right, we are going to start by getting to know each other a bit, so I want you all to write your names on the cards in front of you so I know who I am calling on.” 

Nobody at my table had a single writing instrument, and they all needed to borrow a pen or pencil from me. 

Professor: “Next, I want you all to pull out your laptops. You are expected to have these; it was in the list of program requirements when you applied. I want you to open [Website]. I can’t show you the student version because I have a teacher’s account.”

She quickly realised that out of seventy students, only about twenty-five of us had brought our laptops. 

Professor: “Today, you can look this up on your phones, but in the future, you need to bring your laptops. I don’t want you pulling out your phones in class. This is the first day of college; you all need to be better prepared than this.”

We were then given an hour off and asked to meet in a different room for uniform fitting. I ate lunch and then found the room, arriving ten minutes early with about twenty classmates.

Uniform fitting ended up going by very slowly because they could only take three people at a time, but the email we had gotten the week before told us that we had two and a half hours blocked off for this, so I wasn’t concerned. After ten minutes of waiting past the time we were supposed to meet, people at the back of the line started loudly complaining, and several started to call the professor profanities behind her back for making them wait sooooo long. 

Things like this continued all semester. Our Sociology teacher started bringing a box of pencils to the tests because most of the class didn’t bring anything to write with for the test, or at least not a pencil for the scantron. Several people stopped showing up for Fitness because they thought the professor was a b**** for making us go for runs.

One girl got kicked out of Psychology because she screamed at the professor and called her several names when she was asked to put her phone away. (She was in her late twenties and angry that the “high schoolers” were taking up the back row so she couldn’t hide her phone as easily.)

Over twenty people asked for extensions the night before a major presentation was due because they hadn’t read the instructions and hadn’t started the project, thinking that we would be working on it in class that day.

Someone dropped out because she was concerned about how the homework was interfering with her bar-hopping with her fake ID. 

Thankfully, many of these people will not be returning next semester, but it still confuses me how many of these people somehow wanted to go into law enforcement without even being able to respect authority.

I always carry extra pens in case one dies. How do you show up for a final exam without even one?