Three months of intermittently returned phone calls later, as fall classes loomed at the local schools, I started looking around. San Diego State University and UC San Diego offer Chinese classes daily. SDSU's runs from noon to 12:50. Either involves at least an hour of bicycling each way; neither route is especially appealing, nor is the idea of travelling over two hours a day for less than one hour of class. Mesa College, a community college, is only 7 miles away and offers twice-a-week classes from 6:30 pm to 8:50 pm.

I almost rejected the idea, not wanting to spend hours a week on my bicycle going to and from class. Then I realized that the concept of rejected the commuting and class time in order to keep my schedule clear was incompatible with my key goals for this year: learning Chinese and exercising more. So I rode over to the college to drop off a signed enrollment form and try out the ride. Mesa College, oddly enough, is on a mesa. The problem is that I live on a different mesa. So it's uphill both ways, but still only a 35 minute ride, reasonably free of nasty traffic.

I ended up having to do some faxing as part of my enrollment. I don't have a FAX machine, and I didn't feel like running over to Kinko's, so I signed up for an online fax program. I actually did this months ago; first I tried to get Yahoo's fax service, but after a deranged amount of trouble trying to recover my secure password I gave up and went with eFax because they were at the top of the search results. I never actually used it that time, and forgot to cancel, and so they made off with $13/month for two months of nothing.

This time I looked at a longer list, and tried Innoport. After signing up, I got an email saying that it would take between a few minutes and a day to verify my information and open my account. I waited half an hour and, when nothing happened, wrote an email back asking them to cancel the signup. Then I signed up with efax, which took about a minute, uploaded a document, and faxed it. No problem.

When I got a fax back the next day, problems started. After flailing around for a few minutes, I figured out how to download the fax. As a .efx file, which is apparently a proprietary format of eFax. Which requires a Windows-only program to decode. Not cool. I was in a rush, so I fired up the Windows partition on my laptop, installed the software, and managed to extract my fax.

The next day, I was done with my faxing needs for the time being, so I went to cancel my eFax account. This is when it got ugly. There are no links to cancel from the eFax pages; I had to search for "cancel" to discover that you have to have an online chat with a customer service drone in order to cancel. This is when I remembered going through this the first time and started hitting myself on the head. Excerpts from the chat:

jaufrec: Hello. I would like to cancel my eFax account ...
Dennis Godair: Thank you for the information. I am sorry to hear that you wish to cancel. May I ask why you are cancelling your fax account?
jaufrec: because you require a windows client to view faxes
jaufrec: and because your cancel process is unnecessarily difficult
Dennis Godair: we have an exclusive offer for you. If you wish to keep this account, then you can avail a one time offer on this account. You can keep this account at a nominal non refundable rate of $6.95 for the next 90 days instead of paying $12.95 every month, as such saving $31.89 over a period of 90 days.
jaufrec: please cancel my account
Dennis Godair: I surely understand your decision to cancel, but, this is a very good offer and you will be paying around only $2.31 per month as monthly fee during this period. You will need to contact us just once by the end of this period to let us know whether you wish to continue or not. There is certainly no obligation to stay back after this period if you do not wish to.
jaufrec: please cancel my account
jaufrec: is there actually a human being present?
Dennis Godair: Okay. I will cancel your account with immediate effect.
Dennis Godair: I'm sorry that you are leaving eFax. At eFax, we are continuously improving our products and services. Please do consider us if your faxing needs should change in the future.

So much for eFax. Meanwhile, a full eight days after I aborted my signup for Innoport, I got this email:

After further review, we have determined that we will have to decline activation for this innoport account with the billing information provided during the sign up process. Please be advised that the credit card entered has not been charged. [...]

So, obviously, a big thumbs down and avoid-at-all-costs warning for both eFax and Innoport. Innoport in particular was so bad and weird that I am keeping an eye on my bank statement in case they are just a front for identify theft or something. eFax I'm thinking is just maliciously greedy and stupid.