Zwinkyness

Grrr. Let me begin by saying that I’m angry, mad, pissed off, stressed out and finding myself having a hard time to breathe, on top of all that. What for? you may ask. Well, apparently certain people in this world tend to believe in the easy way out for everything. Doing half-arsed group assignments, only translating a third of the pages, and finding a bloody excuse for everything. I for one am definately fed up with people trying to take advantage of me.

It’s not that bad that they ask my help during an English assignment. I know I’m good at English, I know I’m at the top of the class and translating something in English only takes me a minute. I can understand why they want to copy my entire maths homework, even though one of them is fairly decent in maths. I don’t even mind that they have copied every mathematical homework we had to do this entire year. I’m fine with that: I can see that certain people can do maths and others can’t.

I never ask them anything in return. Although I have a pretty busy life, I never wanted them to do a homework for me or to write an essay for me. To be honest, I prefer doing it myself because atleast I learn something that way. I admit that I have been on the verge of asking a couple of times, but I never did. It’s just that when it’s the third homework in one week that they copy, that it kind of gets on my nerves. But I let it go, I relax, take it easy, telling myself that stressing over it will do me no good anyway. But this…this is just too much.

I’m decent at French. My best friend is a genius at French. Fair enough, she does do it slowly and puts her time in every French essay she writes, but her Mom is a French tutor and in my opinion, she enherited atleast some bit of talent towards the language. I dislike French: too many rules and I just don’t have a feeling with it. If I want to prepare a decent French essay, it literally takes me hours. Now, alright, what should be done has to be done. So during the holidays (this week) we had to make a group assignment. The four of us. It was a one way ticket to Hell.

We usually get along great, we’re friends and have known each other for ages. That’s not where the problem lies. When we met up at A. ’s (for the sake of not mentioning their real names here) house, there were no real problems either. We had to type atleast three pages, but we only finished one in about four hours time. Surely, that might be slow, but we wanted it to be great for some of us (heh…me) have some grades to catch up on the subject. Since we still had another two pages to go and not that much time on our hands, we decided to split up. Yesterday, C. and I made the second page together and today, A. and B. would finish up the essay. Not a good plan, I might add.

Well, it took C. and I another four hours yesterday to finish the second page, constantly looking up things in the dictionary (VanDale, the fat and heavy one). Now, C.’s Mom teaches French herself and she is always happy to recheck our group assignments, she always does it when C. and I write an essay together. Of course this comes in real handy, but we never take advantage of it. Lets say that perhaps we do not translate one or two things we really don’t know in an entire essay, or so. All the other stuff we look up or try to find solutions for; it’s just that when we really don’t know how to put it, we ask C.’s Mom. Now, eventually we finished our part of the essay yesterday after another four hours of hard work and sent the file to A. and B. so they could round it up today.

Let me tell you, what I received in my mailbox about twenty minutes ago, was by no means a finished essay. They even had the guts to say: “A. did not bring her dictionary, so there were a couple of things we could not look up. Maybe your Mom could translate them, C.” Yes, A. has a nifty dictionary on her computer, which is quite helpful: just type a word and you’ll find everything the VanDale has to say about it. But I don’t have such awesome software installated, nor does C. We have to rely on nothing but the old-fashioned, heavy, slow dictionary in the shape of a book and we have to manage it just like that. So, saying that “we didn’t have A.’s dictionary” is a bloody meaningless and stupid excuse. Who cares whether or not you had some software to rely on? C. and I were searching FOUR HOURS in a row in a bloody book to find the expressions and words we needed! The text you people came up with was not nearly half as good, and a third of it is Dutch rather than French! Could you atleast have the decency to try and use a BLOODY DICTIONARY!

Pfew. It seems like I’m getting stressed out a lot about this and I’m sorry. It’s just: I could have been doing a lot of other things too yesterday afternoon, but no, I rather fulfill my duty and keep searching in that dictionary until I practically knew half of it out of my head (so to speak, of course). More even, saying “Maybe C.’s Mom can do it” so carelessly, is a sign of totally no respect and uber-lazyness. What, you think C.’s Mom will like having to translate twenty sentences to French? You think she will do it gladly? We should be thankful that she atleast wants to check our essays, now you want her to write half a page for you! You know what I call that? Taking advantage! And you people have taken advantage of me, and now you’re trying to take advantage of C.’s Mom. Well, it’s not going to work. Not anymore.

When I let you copy my homework everytime you ask, and never want anything in return, I atleast expect you to have the decency to write a proper essay. C. came to my place yesterday for four hours too to search up things: she could have easily begged her Mom to write it for her too. But she’s not like that and I’m not like that. I rather work a few hours more than letting someone else do the hard work for me. But you people are not like that: you like taking advantage of people. I know you barely try doing your homework anyway, and if you had the decency to open up a dictionary you would easily find half of the English expressions you ask me. However, it was my mistake that I never minded helping you. You have grown accustomed to me always giving in and letting you take advantage of my hard work. But not anymore. Yes, I will look up some of those sentences and translate them to French. Sure, I will once again do work that you people should have been doing. But I will do it for C. so she does not have to do all the work on her own, because I know she won’t just go to her Mom and ask her to translate the damn thing. It just something she would never do, asking others to do the work for her. And it’s something I would never do either.

So now, this is my message to A. and B. although they will most probably never read it anyway (most offline people don’t know about the existence of my website) : I’m dissapointed in you. I thought you were more than some lazy cows. Don’t think I will forget this: I might keep on talking to you and I might pretend to even like you, but I will always remember what kind of lazy-bones you people really are. I will especially remember it next time you ask to copy my homework or want help with an assignment. Don’t be surprised when the answer is: “No, and fuck off.”

Thanks for listening to my rant, people.