Death to Sallie Mae and all her god damned sisters....

What the hell is with the Mae Dynasty? Sallie, Nellie, Fannie, Ginnie, their black sheep cousin Noel Levitz (obviously a Jew. Levitz, hello. But what kind of Jew is named Noel?), and then there is the Mac side of the family, Farmer Mac and Freddie Mac, probably the ones in charge of the annual family hootenanny. Plus a whole bunch of other subsidiaries. They all have these benign, Mayberry names to hide the fact that they are infiltrating the government and taking over the country, starting with my damn Federal Stafford Loans.

Being a poor nonprofit worker and a struggling graduate student, at the present time my student loans equal approximately 1.5 times the amount of money I am going to make this year, before takes. After taxes, plus the interest adding up on these loans, don't think about. It’s painful. And not to get off the original topic, which is my hatred of Sallie Mae, but fuck the older generations who say we are so bad with our money. What do they expect from us when the only way to get a decent education is to sell your soul and your first born? Then when we get out of college, we get crappy paying jobs and can only afford to live in the cities with the good jobs by racking up insane amounts of credit card debt. It’s the damn system of "Keeping up with the Jones'" that our parents and their generation created that is putting us in the financial shit box right now.

But I digress, back to the creepy Mae family tree. In my quest to be financially responsible, I decided to consolidate my graduate school loans with undergraduate loans. I did not realize the paper storm this would be or how many times I was going to have to call the Sallie Mae call center (otherwise known as Purgatory), located somewhere in India, where they just wake people up as the phones start ringing.

If you ever have to consolidate loans, call the Great Lakes Educational Loan Services (they consolidated my undergrad loans). I want to send these people cookies or something, they are fabulous. No matter how many times I call, I never wait on hold for very long, everyone who answers the phone is extremely knowledgeable, and they are always so nice! They're Midwesterners, enough said. When Sallie Mae started sending me notices that I should consolidate the loans that I have with her sister Nellie, I called the number she gave me. After a few horrendously nonsensical calls to her, I knew I needed to get my loans away from the evil Mae sisters. Their customer service people were useless. I am not one of those people who is morally against international call centers. If a corporation is treating their employees well, I don't care if my call is routed through the North Pole. The reason this bothered me so much is because the customer service people had no idea what I was talking about, worse yet, they had no idea what they were talking about, and the connection was so horrible every time it sounded like someone was speaking Chinese through a fan.

Then I decided to switch these loans over to Great Lakes. I made one very informative call to them and had all the forms I needed to make this happen. The only problem was that I needed to inform Wicked Witch Sallie and her evil minions. This process was literally a two hour endeavor of phone calls, holding, transfers, and translation that left me wanting to obliterate all Mae family members from the face of the Earth. And the best part about it, is that once someone finally understood what I needed, all it took was one lousy three sentence fax and it was done (hopefully, I mean, they have the fax, but that doesn't mean that the trained monkeys they have manning the fax machine can decipher the message).

The evil empire that is the Mae family may have trumped me. It’s too soon to tell. I do, however, get this creepy Scientology feeling from them. If I go missing, they'd be the first place to look.