Voices of the shutdown: "You can't just shut things down and give the public no time to prepare"
Twenty-four-year-old Patrick Scrimshaw had planned to take this semester off from pursuing his linguistics degree at Brigham University, in Provo, Utah, to attend training for the National Guard, delaying his graduation date by one semester.
"I got called the night before I was suppose to report, saying, 'Because of the shutdown you're being furloughed and we can't send you to the school, the school is canceled. So we might have the school again in March, depending if the shutdown ends by then but for now, you're out of luck,'" said Scrimshaw.
Thanks to the government shutdown, Scrimshaw now says he may not graduate for another two years.
"I was going to just do the training during this semester and then in January I would go back to school, but now because the [next] training starts in March, that's partly through the semester so I'm going to have to take next semester off as well," said Scrimshaw.
"After that, I'm supposed to go to a language training center in Monterrey, Ca., but I don't even know if the training is going to start in March so that might even be on hold, and the language school is like a year-and-a-half ... so I'm going to have to wait probably two years before I graduate," he explained.
On top of it, because Scrimshaw is no longer enrolled in school, his student loans have kicked in.
"I have my published orders from the army, and I said, 'I can give you a copy of these orders,' and they [student loans] told me, 'Because it's not war-related, because you're not being deployed, you still have to pay your loans,'" said Scrimshaw.
Scrimshaw's wife is 13 weeks pregnant. He has taken a part-time job to start covering expenses the National Guard training would've paid for.
"We were going to use the money from training for prenatal appointments and for the birth but now we're not going to be able to do that, so I'm looking for a second job," said Scrimshaw.
Scrimshaw says that although he has his reservations about the Affordable Care Act, "you can't just shutdown the government just because you don't like the law."
"I don't like the fact that I have to pay for my student loans but I have to. I'm not the government, I can't just tell them, 'No, I'm not going to pay my loan,'" he added.
"Even if you do agree that the government is spending too much money and we need to cut back on certain programs, even if that's your philosophy, and I kind of agree with that ... you can't just shut things down and give the public no time to prepare for something like that," said Scrimshaw.