Polite E-mails

I am a college student who needs help with finding housing.  Off-campus was difficult for me to handle, so I am hoping to select a room on-campus.  Easy?  Of COURSE not!

The point of this post is to say that there are two emails in almost every situation:  the one you want to send and the one you do send.

This is the one I want to send:

Dear Housing,

I went to your office SEVERAL weeks ago on November 6th in hopes of meeting with someone in person about selecting housing for the 2014 spring term.  I had been meeting with a professor and had been in the neck of the woods.  I normally live an hour away.  I am a returning second semester sophomore looking for on-campus housing.

I was stonewalled by your two student employees, saying that everything opens up on "January third."  I asked several questions, to which the only answer was, "January third."

According to tonight's research, they should have been telling me "January 2nd."  And they should have let me know that student self-assign has been open since November 25th and my chances for getting any type of room on-campus have been dwindling daily.  I really would have appreciated meeting with a person who could have given me this information and perhaps walked me through the steps on the website.

I am very disappointed by the dismissive and inaccurate service I was given by these two ladies.  If I am wrong in any way, please correct me and I apologize for me forwardness.

In any case,  I have found these instructions for how to self-assign a room:

(Insert paragraph here) I chose not to put the instructions here because I don't want people to google instructions and find this.

I am ready to make any deposit necessary and to follow these instructions; however the Temple website does not have the layout that this paragraph claims that it has.  For example, I do not see a "student" tab and when I click on "My Housing," the promising-looking links lead nowhere in the direction that this paragraph claims.  There are no instructions about how or where to pay the deposits online, except the assurance that one can make them online.  As I'm sure you may expect, I am quite frustrated with the deceptively happy-go-lucky "this is easy" format of the housing how-to PDF document.

Would you please be willing to help me as soon as you can?

My telephone number is 

I appreciate that you will take into consideration that I made a physical effort much earlier than today to obtain housing information, albeit a thwarted attempt. 

Thank you,

Danielle Hyde

Well-worded, articulate, taking advantage of the customer-is-always-right policy.

My dad wouldn't even read it. 

"You want these people to help you, right?"

Oh.

This is what I'm going to write:

Dear housing,

I am a returning blah blah blah...

I have been doing some research to try and self-select but keep running into confusion! I must be doing something wrong and I really need your help with this.  Could you call me as soon as possible? I'd love to speak with someone in person to get my scatterbrained in order.

Sincerely,

Danielle

Something suck-up-ish like that.

Sara Bareilles (not sure of spelling) has written a song about speaking up for oneself: "say what you want to say, and let the words fall out; honestly, I want to see you be brave" etc.  I like her song and wish my dad would've said, go for it, girl!  

But it actually would have scared me if he did that because it wouldn't be typical and then I'd feel like I was losing my father, like the wise and logical man was slipping away.  Then I would have to make the choice for myself to not "say what I want to say."