The Group Project From Hell: An Epic of Inefficiency and Despair
So, I fucking loathe group projects. Like, it's 2:30AM and I'm sitting here drenched in cold sweats after suffering a PTSD-style nightmare about one that happened in college. That shit still terrorizes my dreams. Lucky you, Reddit, you now get to hear the whole sad, crappy saga. Buckle up.
So, picture this: it’s sophomore year and my Miserable Business Ethics course has thrown this clusterfuck of a group project at us. We’re to “engage with a local charity, leverage positive impact, and produce comprehensive funding proposals” by the end of the semester. Cool. Gotcha, professor. This would be super altruistic and educational if the entire process wasn’t due to be an absolute train wreck from the outset.
We get randomly assigned to our groups and I, in cruel universal fate, end up with Perky Tina, "Stoner Steve", and Detached Dave. Tina manages to piss me off in under a minute by cheerfully suggesting a Facebook group AND a WhatsApp group, “just to cover all the bases.” Steve is the kinda guy who turns up to a 9AM lecture in yesterday’s clothes, reeking of weed and Doritos; as for Dave, I’m not entirely sure he even knows that he is, in fact, enrolled in college.
Fast-forward a few weeks, through a haze of lukewarm group meetings and half-assed emails, and we somehow start to pull a plan together. Tina has dragged us kicking and screaming toward something vaguely presentable. But here's where the true horror begins.
The night before submission day, we’re all huddled in a grim library corner when we realize that nobody has spell-checked or proofread this fucking 60-page monster. Tina’s off at some sorority thing, Steve's in another dimension, and Dave has wandered off into the night, so I, like the moron I am, volunteer.
And holy shit, guys, the grammar was a fucking bloodbath. It's like English was their fourth language and they'd learned it from a particularly confused parrot. I spend six hours, SIX FUCKING HOURS, pruning commas and annihilating semicolons like some late-night punctuation vigilante.
Finally, around 5AM, I crawl into bed, utterly defeated by the ruthless tide of grammatical abominations. But the worst was yet to come.
Submission day. I drag my sleep-deprived ass to class, ready to lob this cursed project into the prof's inbox and collapse in a small, grammar-induced coma. Except, I get a fucking text from Tina: "Hey, did anyone print the report?"
I froze. Guys, we didn't fucking print the report. It was a digital AND a hard-copy submission. In my caffeine-fueled haze, I had completely missed it. AND NO ONE ELSE REMEMBERED TOO.
World War 3 broke out in the group chat. Tina was freaking out over some WhatsApp voice message. Steve was like, “whoops, my bad.” Dave was still MIA. And me? I was sprinting across campus in yesterday's clothes, praying to the printing gods, clutching my USB drive with all the desperation of a man on the edge.
Long story short, I didn't make it. I had to email the professor, explain the situation, and plead for mercy. He ended up docking us 10% for being late. Tina was livid but too perky to express it properly.
Anyway, I've had a few drinks since then, and now I find this shit kinda funny, but at the time, it was like watching a train wreck happen... while being in the fucking train. I may or may not have cried a little when handing in the hard copy.
So, there you have it, my fucked-up saga of the worst group project fiasco that still haunts my dreams. Time for another drink.
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