Terrible Tuesday

I hate group projects. I think they are designed by the government to break students spirits at a young age so that we never get the idea in our head to band together and revolt against the system. Why would this work you might ask? Because that would be classified as a “group project” and we were all taught at a young age that those are actually hell on Earth.

Monday everyone in my group meet up and we all went over what we were going to do and then each of us would make changes and pass the powerpoint around, meet up the next day before lecture and decided who would say what. Nobody did anything. So it was two hours before the lecture was going to start and we had a fifty percent chance of getting our names called to present. Oh yeah, and one of our group members wasn’t there while the other one was just on his phone to entire time making no contributions whatsoever. I growing more and more anxious and my stress level was rising to new and fantastic heights to the point were it was visible on my face the mental breakdown that I was currently having. Half an hour before we had to leave for the lecture we finally called our missing partner. He was sick and not coming to the lecture. Now I really began to panic, he was the one on point for one of the key slide which meant we all new the overview for why it was in there but he was the one who could talk about it and make it sound highly intelligent. Ecstatic, one of our group members proclaimed, “This is fantastic! It means we don’t have to go today!” No. We all have been in college for too long to know that just because one person was missing it wouldn’t be good enough, because if a group was called we would have to go whether we were ready or not.

            So we arrive at the lecture, our presentation sloppily thrown together and wait outside in a hope to corner the professor before she comes in and plead our cause. We end up catching here, making our point as professional as possible but there was no use hiding the panic in our eyes. She saw our concern, and I think no professor wants anyone to do poorly when the chance of them succeeding is optional, so she agreed, we would not be called that day, we would go next lecture session.   

            The lecture was miserable, the people who went, the calibre of their presentations was outstanding, if we had gone, well I don’t even want to think about that. The quality of what we had, compared to theirs? Ours was atrocious.

            That lecture had to have been the longest two hours of my life. All I wanted to do the entire time was just go back to my room, curl up in my bed and just go to sleep, I didn’t want to think anymore about how if we had gone that day my grade would have taken such a wound that it probably would not have been able to be recovered. I just wanted to leave. But I couldn’t. It was now my job to get on everyone and make sure they did their work. So I did what I should have done in the first place, our at least someone in the group should have done, I delegated, I facebook messaged everyone in the group and assigned them a task and told them to complete it because this was not going to happen again. Next class we were going to be prepared and we were going to get a good grade and each person in that group was going to pull their own weight and if they didn’t I would make sure that the professor knew who was slacking and who wasn’t. I hate it when I have to do things like that.

            The rest of the day was just exhausting. Once I got back to my flat from my second lecture I was pleased to see that Cassie, Olly and Adam had made pasta salad and had waited for me to get back before they ate it. So I sat down with them, ranted a little bit about what had happened to me today, stuffed my mouth and then just relaxed. I was just so done with that day. All I wanted to do was just continue to sit and the kitchen table, eat and talk with good friends. So, that’s exactly what I did.

            Despite the stress of the day, it ended on a pretty good note.