Headache

8 Dec 2004
Time: 23:02
Mood: Tired. Headache. Worried. Paranoid.


I'm stealing a few minutes to write a blog - for sanity's sake. I knew my outing the other day with Amelia and SC was very ill-afforded. But I did not know how terrible the price to pay really was. It's terribly hectic and the busiest period of this semester. I hope for all our sakes after this week, things will slow down to a trickle (fat chance!) considering there's only 4 more weeks of this semester to go before our finals and, finally, holidays, hallelujah.

+Tests on Monday and Tuesday.
+Rushing assignments for computer programming on Wednesday (today). We spent almost 3 hours in the computer lab (one hour of class, one hour of free access and another 40 minutes we forgo a lecture to wrap things up)
+Preparing Powerpoint (for the first time, ever!) for BM presentation, for Thursday. That took me almost 5 or 6 hours added up together.
+Preparing and rehearsing speech for public speaking on Friday.

Given, powerpoint was that easy to deal with and I had fun playing around the schemes and animation and graphics, but it is undeniably time-consuming.

There's no shortcuts to speech-memorizing. Rehearse, rehearse and rehearse.

All this while being saddled with an irresponsible, inconsiderate, lazy, blur, tidak-apa attitude group mate. People say the best gain you can have as a college student is terrific groupmates. And the worst loss is having terrible groupmates.

I say one terrible groupmate is one too many. We're expected to be independent, smart and mature enough to handle projects and assignments and every problem that comes with it, whether it's concerning the work itself or the work attitude of your own groupmates, but jeez, what if some of them are just not prepared for collegelife?

Because of his attitude the 3 of us (4 to a group) have to take up his work, whether editing, correcting or redoing. Or in some cases, doing everything on his behalf. We did not even realise how much we've spoilt him until we've reached a point where he absolutely have no idea what's going on and take for granted we will inform, do and thrust our assignments to him for him to pass up. And he'll be annoyed that we dare to hassle him for something as petty as passing work up to lecturers.

Why did we do his work for him? First off, it's not something we can blame him for. His competency in English. His grammar is atrocious. His spelling. His past/present/future tense mix ups. His sentence structure is...weird. He have problems identifying which words are verbs and which are adjectives and toss them onto essays carelessly. And it pains me a lot to see such...abuse of language.

Secondly, his work attitude. He's not exactly the most responsible person. Do this today, give it to us tomorrow...will be delayed for 2 or 3 days at best, at worst, we'll do it ourselves because we're just too tired of waiting. He is also terribly inconsiderate. Whatever we need to email or share information about, it has to be done at his convenience. HE dictate the time, and he might not even be online at the time he dictated and he does not bother SMS-ing you. You wait and you wait and you wait and you message him and he will sheepishly tell you he simply forgot. Or he think something is too heavy for him to take back to do, or his writing isn't nice enough, or because we were doing it all along, we should do the follow-ups, cos we know what's going on.

Thirdly, I think he knew we're hard workers, so he took everything easy. Anything he did not finish, we'll polish them for him. Anything he do not understand, pass it to us and it'll be done. We do not demand perfection, but we WANT a reasonable standard of work. It's in fact not impossible for reasonable. Its NOT.

Fourth, he's terribly dependent. Sometimes I really want to knock his forehead and go "Hello? HELLO! We're in COLLEGE! It's a dog-eat-dog environment! Each to his own! Pull your own weight! Stop hanging onto our coat tails! Stop taking credit for work you did not do!"

It's like one of those programming pseudocodes we do--

Independent?
Successful college student
Else
GO BACK TO FORM 6!
End of file

or the flowchart that'll show--

GO BACK TO FORM 6!<--NO--Independent?--YES-->Successful college student

Take note I'm filtering the flood of thoughts about him in my brain and choosing my words carefully. The real picture isn't as rosy. Why don't we kick him out, then? We...don't. I don't know. I wasn't in their class last semester. I laughed at my other groupmates because they're stuck with him. Karma. Now I'm stuck with him, too. We don't kick him because he's a...friend (though now I'm not so sure). We don't kick him because he won't have anywhere to go. We don't kick him cos we're in a comfort zone. So we end up with a liability asset....oh well, yes, no more false pretenses, we have a great, big, sorry liability on our asses. And we're fed up. We're REALLY fed-up. He is very damned lucky he's a college group mate. Collective benefit. If he's a work colleague, I would have screwed him up good and well. Screw! Him!

He can't even do a simple type-and-print job properly! He didn't know our presentation tomorrow isn't on suicide, it's on handphones!

Oh Lord. Help me. Give him some smart-cells because ours are all zapped up!

Sigh another 4 weeks. And everybody else is on holidays.

Comments:
A visitor made this comment,
dear o dear.
having bad group members is equivalent to death sentence in college. well. not to that extreme but, you do feel like dying dont you?
now you know why they say don't mix personal and business matter. friends can be friends but sometimes they make extremely bad business partner.

cheerio

sephquarttz

A visitor made this comment,
hang in there. Breathe.
Amelia