Over a week’s worth of ranting, read if you’re bored, you’ve been warned…
This week has been totally shit for me. For those that don’t already know, I’ve been doing a group project in uni for the past month or so, everything about it has been horrid. We were given the task of designing a bicycle telemetry system, what the telemetry actually showed was up to us. We (mostly me actually, more on that in a bit) decided to do an odometer (distance), speedometer, tachometer (RPM), inclinometer, pedal pressure gauge and gear ratio indicator (actual ratio, not the number of the current gear).
From the start I unintentionally doomed myself by cornering myself into the team leader position because I was the only one doing anything on the team. The 3 weeks leading up to this week were mainly me doing all the organisation related work and determining team roles with the help of my friend who was in the team. As the time approached to get building I kept urging everyone to get to the labs and get working. All I got was a bunch of excuses and near radio silence from my friend.
Every week during our mentor meetings (groups are assigned a lecturer as a supervisor/mentor) I’m sticking my neck out for the team and pretty much lying telling him that we’re on track when we’re not. Then came this week which was our last week to build before demonstrations next week. Again, I urge all of my team to get in and start working, again, mostly excuses and radio silence. Luckily our programmer decided to come in and start helping me with the bulk of the work (our project was 95% programming), unfortunately he isn’t great so I had to share the bulk of his work with him, despite me saying in the skills matrix that I was rubbish at programming and had no interest in doing any. The skills matrix is a table with various tasks that will be done during the project and/or skills required and how competent and willing all members are to do them (I put 0 for everything programming related).
By some miracle (and me saying goodbye to ALL of my free time and most of my sleep) we started making progress. Tue through to Fri I was waking up at 07:00, getting to the labs in uni at 8:55 before they even open the labs (apart from Tuesday, read my rant a few posts back), leaving at 21:00 when they close after extended working hours because of our projects and getting home at 22:30 just to repeat it again the next day. Our programmer also stayed until late but not as late as me, and also around Tuesday my friends decided to resurface, luckily, he’d been radio silent but he’d pretty much finished his part of the project so he ended up joining the night squad (me, him and our programmer) to help us get things working. Then around Thursday the other 2 slackers decide to show up, asking me what they’re supposed to be doing, despite me having made is damn well clear on more than one occasion exactly what they had to do.
Turns out that over the past 3 weeks both of the idiots had done fuck all and only just started designing their parts…3 days before we stop getting access to the labs. One of them ended up giving me a half working, basic code that I had to heavily modify with help from a friend that was in another group and happened to just be killing time when he helped me out. The idiot that gave the the half-arsed code was responsible for the inclinometer. It isn’t even a proper inclinometer, it doesn’t output a complex numerical value from a high tech sensor, it was just displaying “L”, “R”, “F”, “B” depending on which tilt switch had been triggered (tilt switches are just on/off toggle switches that work when tilted…obviously). This was a very basic task.
The other fuckwit was given the gear ratio indicator, this may sound tricky, but it is literally just the wheel RPM divided by the pedal RPM. That meant he had to take the RPM code which me and our programmer spent a huge chunk of time on, duplicate it, change the variable names on the second one to prevent clashing values, and then divide the output value from each code, that was it, a division…and he fucked that up, so I had to do it instead. We did 90% of his work for him and he still managed to make a hash of it.
Each week we have to fill out group progress reports which include how many hours each member has contributed. These hours count to the contribution percentage of each member to the project. The percentages play a very big part in what grade you get individually This week I spend an idiotic 30h working on the project, my friend spent 25h and our programmer spent 26h. The imbecile with the ratio claimed 16h, but I let it slide because it doesn’t affect the 3 of us that actually contributed that much. But the retarded fuck that did the inclinometer claimed 28 fucking hours. I didn’t see it immediately because he filled his part out in front of our mentor during the meet this week.
I called him out on our group chat today and at first he tried to defend himself but I crushed him, then the gear ratio retard tried to defend him with broken logic and broken math, I crushed him too. I ended up letting the inclinometer tard get away with 20h for the sake of not starting an even bigger argument.
Luckily last night my friend and our programmer managed to integrate the inclinometer and pedal pressure gauge while I was troubleshooting our speedometer, tachometer, inclinometer and gear ratio indicator integration. Then we managed to integrate all of them into one code. My friend and I spent the rest of the evening troubleshooting the final build (our programmer had to go home early) and got the wretched thing to work.
We’ve still got the demonstration to do and paperwork to submit. The demo has to be accompanied by a powerpoint. I left the creation of said powerpoint to the 2 slackers. If I’d known they were the slackers I wouldn’t have given it to them, but even then I would have had to give them something. As a result I’m going to make a backup presentation without telling them about it and will pull it out if they don’t deliver. I also have to edit the group report with all member inputs as it’s my job. I’m glad nobody else wanted to be team leader otherwise we would have been screwed. At least I can get things done (I’m not being vain here, when it comes to projects, I don’t fuck around; and this one is a big one, it’s 90% of a module).
Other bad things about this god forsaken project:
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The main lecturer responsible for the project has been lying to us. The first week of the project was like an intro week and the start of research and other prep, then we had assignment week which is a lecture free week where we get all of our assignments done so that we can work on the projects when we come back. She said we will be working “full time” when we get back, apparently “full time” meant full time not counting normally scheduled lectures, and first year lab sessions getting us second years kicked out of the labs for 3h on certain days.
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After we got back from assignment week it turns out that we were expected to start building immediately as if assignment week was actually dedicated to the projects and not the assignments we were supposed to finish so that we can work on the projects
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The organisation from the lecturer side has been piss poor. We were told we had to upload weekly reports to a site that the uni uses, but the project section was a mess and it wasn’t specified where exactly we were supposed to upload to, I ended up uploading to the wrong place (like many other groups) and got some irritated emails from our mentor and the lecturer responsible for the project. How can they expect us to be professional when they can’t get their shit together?
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The project lecturer said that if we have any uncooperative group members we should just “deal with it.” That was an exact quote.
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Tue - Fri I was running on a litre of lucozade every single day (to keep me awake), boxed sandwiches (after I had eaten my homemade one) and other junk food.
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On Wed I lost about 4h in a society session where I was working on the lazer tag project.
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On Thu I lost an extra 2h of project work because I was doing testing for our Tesla coil project (luckily not a graded project, just something me and some friends are doing with one of our lecturers).
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Yesterday some final year project students came by the lab to work on their project (a quadcopter / drone), they were having issues so I decided to spend a few mins to help them troubleshoot. At one point I reached into their LiPo bag to pull out a battery when I felt a strong prickling sensation over the top of my hand. Turns out I got well over 50 invisible fibreglass splinters stuck on my hand. So I had to spend 20 mins waxing my hand with some electrical tape I borrowed from my friend (I finished them off at home with stronger gorilla tape). At one point I accidentally got the splinters on my forehead so I had to wax that too. My friend got some sly footage of that; I didn’t know he was filming at the time.
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According to my friends, the project had a serious effect on my mood and general attitude. They said they’d never seen me behave like that. I know exactly what they’re on about because by the end of the week I was noticing it too. For instance I don’t usually swear but this week I’ve almost been able to rival Gordon Ramsey. I wasn’t hostile to my friends but they said I was extremely irritable and looked like I’d seen hell. My friends in other groups were constantly wondering why I was working alone and where the rest of my group was. I even had a friend walk up to me and say they felt sorry for me.
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The EEE (Electrical & Electronic Engineering) students have been rendered almost completely useless and CSE (Computer Systems Engineering) students had been piled on with most of the work as the projects were very programming heavy. EEEs (I’m one) were reduced to placing the most basic components on a circuit board.
Good things about this fucked up project:
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I’ve spent so long in the labs recently that I’m on a first name basis with one of our technicians. That’s good because we’re forming something of a friendship and he has offered me free components for personal projects (within reason obviously).
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I’m making myself known as a better student for enduring this torture
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Me and some friends from other groups actually got some good laughs a few times
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My mentor’s reaction when he asked us how we found the project and I said that I’ve loathed every second of it. He was taken aback completely.
).
, glad you overcame… 
lol) you’ve worked damn hard these days! Glad that this ended up soon and for sure you are one of the best technicians 
learning and Workin hard every single day! That’s awesome buddy!
lol