And we simply laughed
There are a lot of reasons people laugh. Obviously.
You could laugh at a good joke for example, or your little sister tickled you and you have to laugh. Or maybe you just got away with murdering your target as well as your crew so now you’re looking at an even bigger pot of money you’ll inherit. Evil laugh, just so you know.
In this case it was the latter. Joking it was none of the above. The reason for our laughter was entirely different.
But let me backup a little.
We currently have to work on the biggest project of our entire college career. We, that is two friends and me, are a bit lazy when it comes to college. A bit as in lemme-write-the-entire-20-page-thesis-a-night-before-handing-it-in-lazy, hoping for a response along the lines of “Wow, ikigai (definitely my real name and the way professors address me) that was the best thesis we ever read!” Which, of course, never happens.
So, us being the full blown responsible students we are haven’t done jack shit for the project until now. And it makes up about two third of one semester’s workload. Which, if you haven’t been two class for two months and have to give the final presentation next Friday is A TON. Under normal circumstances we would have to work 100 hour days to make the deadline which if you do the math doesn’t seem possible.
So, what’s the move?
Outsource the work (which, being an entrepreneur, I actually created a reasonable outline on how to go about on) or work smarter. And by smarter I mean, get the results of a group with a similar project and reverse engineer their stuff.
In order to get this project done each group has two meetings with the professor. In these meetings you’re supposed to present your current work, where you are, what you do, and how you plan to get the rest done. Makes a lot of sense, getting feedback is crucial. However, if you don’t have anything to show for your days at the beach, or your days in an office working to build your freedom, not analyse the crap you need for school, it’s tough to make full use of those meetings.
So, in our second meeting with the prof we presented him what we had. Which was basically nothing. When he asked us basic stuff we couldn’t give an answer because well quite frankly we haven’t done anything to be able to answer such questions.
The whole time I was just sitting there with a big fat smile on the inside, thinking about how ridiculous this whole thing is. How ridiculous we didn’t meet up once so we had to meet two hours earlier this morning in order to show him anything. How ridiculous we weren’t taking this thing serious while one of us wants to graduate this semester. How ridiculous our attitude towards this entire college thing is. It’s hilarious. Meanwhile my friend tries to make up stuff on the spot of what we’re about to do and how we’re gonna pull this data out of our ass and then compare it to this other made up data, looking at correlations and yada yada yada.
At one point I couldn’t help it. I had to laugh.
The same was true for our prof. He’s a smart guy. Probably the smartest one out of the entire school staff. Now, I’m pretty good at using misleading body language and playing with tonality to make people believe something that’s not true at all, but this time I didn’t even bother. While at the beginning our prof looked pleased with our progress, a non-existent progress to remind you, and the way we wanted to continue our project, he soon found out that we were full of shit.
So, of course, he had to laugh.
And then we just sat there and laughed. And laughed.
He advised us to cancel all appointments this week as well as next week so we would have the slightest chance of still pulling this off. In order to not stand there next Friday presenting well nothing.
In the end, he pretty much told us we shat the bed on this one.
I’m confident we’ll make it. It’s looking decent right now so let’s see what the next eight days are gonna bring. Haha
Do you ever procrastinate? Or do you hate working under pressure so much you make sure everything is perfectly ready an eternity in advance?