One-of-a-Kind Partners

Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal

I believe that anyone who has gone through college/uni would defintely have certain experience with “certain” people: the ticks, the prarasites, the lazy asses who leave assignments to you. Having such one-of-a-kind partners when doing assingments are certainly horrfying, especially if it’s a 2-pserson project, and when the marks are shared equally. I call’em one-of-a-kind coz you can’t really find uber-lazy attitude in college. Maybe lazy is not the right adjective, irresponsible would be better.

The “mini project” that we did this semester required us to work in teams of 2 to develop a membership system with “whatever language you choose”, though Visual Basic 6 is the preferred language. The thing is that the marks are not given individually on the parts that you do, marks are given to the team as a whole. Both partners get the same marks. So if one fella decides to do a crappy job, both of them will get crappy marks.

I consider myself lucky to partner with Denis. Since we were given a little briefing about this project since last semester, Denis asked me then about partering. Of course I said yes without any further though, since I know Denis pretty well. He’s not the best programmer in class, but at least he’s hardworking and responsible. Nevertheless, the all time “dream team” would be me and Eu Hua. We only partered once and it was for a dumb-ass C-written command line app.

So who’s this one-of-a-kind fella? Of course I won’t name him here, but I was just about this story by my friend, let’s call him A. When A asked his one-of-a-kind partner (B) to discuss the project, A ended up doing the design/coding, with B looking on. Soon, B got bored and fell asleep. He even crawled onto A’s bed for his 1 hour nap.

That wasn’t the worse part. B was supposed to do up the reports part. However, B was such a “smart” fella. During their presentation, B went up first to present the part A did, and left the reports he did to A. So when A presented the reports to our lecturer, he had the shock of his life. The reports were hard-coded. No live-data were processed. When the lecturer asked B why was that the case, B simply said “I dunno SQL”. Wonderful. So the lecturer replied: “You dunno SQL then you don’t graduate lah! Repeat this year until you know…”

Lucky for B, I wasn’t his partner. I would probably have whacked him up in front of the lecturer. Speaking of one-of-a-kind people, there’s also this fella who’s got this thing against our lecturer. Funny thing he’s the only thinking like that. Most of us find our lecturer to be pretty friendly and lenient.

So what do you do when you meet this one-of-a-kind people?

Permalink | April 20th, 2006

2 Responses to “One-of-a-Kind Partners”

  1. Eu Hua Says:
    May 4th, 2006 at 9:57 am

    Well, I know how that feels alright, once is more than enough. Imagine the so-called “Teamwork”, when only part of the group working on a single task. The others just “leech” around and then share the same credit without doing anything. These guys need to be given a good lesson.

  2. Teng Foung Says:
    May 6th, 2006 at 12:03 pm

    I think i know exactly who was that one-of-a-kind person B u meant about. But for the fella who against lecturer i think he just not good in the luck.

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