Well... I went down to see the director of admissions just now, and he made a phone call down to the enrollment office. All of a sudden, my previously missing file was suddenly located and they managed to get me a letter saying that I paid my $500 deposit. So, you'd think that'd be the end of the story... but it just gets better.

I brought the letter over to The Hub (the CMU admin office for students), and showed it to them, requesting that they update my student account (as the director of admissions told me to). And who did I meet but good ol' John (who wrote the email 2 posts down), who tells me - oh I have that letter already. I just dunno where the money is. We know you've paid, but we dunno which account that money went into. So we're trying to find the account that your draft was cashed into to transfer the money out of. So sit tight.

And all this while he was trying to get me to get a copy of the draft from DBS (which would cost $35 and inconvenience my dad), keeping me under the impression that they think I haven't paid and I need to prove it to them. Sneaky.