Tuesday
14 October 2014
11.20pm

Did I mention one of my favourite moments in life is to meet people and end up doing something spontaneously, the more unexpected the better?
Met Yue Ting  at JP and got dragged along to MOS burger to and talk about life and what has been getting her such that she needed to cool off with Clam Chowder?

In return, I told her about how I just ended one of the defining presentations of my uni life. I don't know why but I seem to have to start and end my uni life with bad projects. In year 1 there was the groupmate from hell. In case he chances upon this one day and hurts his ego, let's just call him D (I'd have ranted countless times to close friends but if you want to make a guess, here's a hint: think of a famous arcade game). He was like no sucker groupmate I've ever met; those are usually free riders who piss you off because you have to do more work, not to cover their asses, but just to make sure you deliver a complete project. Once in awhile there is the groupmate who doesn't know what is going on, puts in little effort to figure it out and submits something half-hearted, poorly developed and hardly relevant to dismiss you and claim contribution. D revolutionalised "bad groupmates" by being an individualistic tyrant-type member. When everyone works on their respective parts of the report on Googledocs and cross checks each other's work, he would export the document to edit separately, all this while we are in the same room! Consolidating the 2 documents later becomes extremely hard. Not to forget the epic confrontation we had in a tutorial room. I can't remember how it started but for it to happen, he must have been terrible. He also made drastic changes to everyone's part (which the rest of us have agreed on) right before the final submission. Blatant disrespect for others' work. Period.

This semester, I had the (dis)honour of encountering groupmate S in an NIE module, the last before I can officially file for minor in Ed Studies. He belongs to the wayang-subtype of the free riders category. Hardly attends classes, doesn't know what our project is about, asks a million questions but from those you know he has not read our discussion document and lesson plans. If he did, he'd have found the answers. Chances after chances he still failed to show us effort. When we gave him the final showdown and said we would report him to the tutor if he puts up with this, he told us he was experiencing some family difficulties: how his terminally ill grandparent kept them busy and has recently passed away. I was sympathetic for a couple of seconds but the cynic in me took over soon enough. I don't want to think that anyone would curse his kin this way but he had pushed the limits in the amount of benefit of doubt I could give. If this was true, failing to open up at the start was his fatal mistake.

Eventually, the only contributions he made, no matter how enthusiastically he volunteered to do them, were to print the materials and buy sweets which we were distributing as incentives. He did nothing during the presentation where he was supposed to help in facilitation, "except for passing [Deborah] a piece of paper". I quote our tutor verbatim when we spoke to him about S. At that point we haven't even mentioned names. Turns out he had been observing him because he could tell that there was an imbalance in effort among the group. He knew it before we spoke, telling us to "take a seat" as if it was going to be a long talk.

Now that we have sought justice and the presentation is over anyway, all the crisis and frustrations are over. Time to reinvest the energy in other productive activitites!

Rant over. Now back to work! *flexes*

squeaked.
11:35 PM
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