2nd September 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
The new academic year is definitely in full swing now as far as we’re concerned. Over the last week we’ve been sending out emails to our old students, reminding them to request a tutor now if they’re keen for our help this year. We do that now because at the moment pretty much all of our tutors are looking to take on students, while in a few months, or even weeks, students will have less choice over their tutor, and the most popular tutors will all be fully booked up for the year.
I had an annoying couple of days last week, spending literally 15 hours trying to figure out a programming issue which was eventually fixed in 5 minutes. The fault was mine, I’d just spelt something incorrectly, which I suppose is better than me getting annoyed with something someone else has done. I really have to keep remembering to check all the simple things before assuming a problem is more complicated. 90% of the time it’s a spelling mistake or a missing bracket or semicolon.
We also had a weird situation with a tutor last week; someone who hadn’t declared a lesson and hadn’t updated the situation with his student. His actions had created quite a lot of extra work for us, so we had to charge a small fee for what he had done. This was after sending umpteen emails and trying to call him, and his response was that we should remove the charge because he’s a student and therefore liable to make mistakes. The vast majority of our tutors are so thoughtful and reasonable, but it never ceases to amaze me (when working for Blue Tutors or in life generally) when I come across someone who is so unwilling to take responsibility for their own actions, and thinks that life owes them a living.