The 7th member

One thing you cannot avoid in university is, group assignments. It's not like I hate them, I am somehow happy that these group assignment exist - it allows me to actually go slightly lazy for these since the work is split up to multiple parts, well, at least when everything goes like planned. Most of the times, they do, except for a few painful ones that I better don't recall. Those nights rushing assignments last minute because no one else in the group cares to follow instructions...I'm just kind enough to still submit their names.

Here we have another group assignment, deadline is like two days later.

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So, we had the freedom to select your own teammates. That is good, because you are fully responsible if you picked up some really bad ones - you can't complain and you will try to avoid that, while the lecturer will have less problems to deal with, and that results in better mood, and it might help the results too. So, we just formed a group out of everyone sitting around (we know each other pretty well), and boom we have 6 members now. The lecturer allows up to 7 members in a group, so someone else came and talk to us, wanting to join. Well, nothing bad having another one, right?

We didn't really care about the assignment until last week because we were having mid terms followed by a one week holiday - I mean, no one is really hardworking enough to do stuff during holidays. Naturally, we slacked till we're back to school to do stuff. It's okay, we have plenty of time. 10 days time to write 3000 words is not that challenging. So right after we head back to school, we planned the first meetup in the WhatsApp group. Everyone's in there and we did talked about possible points and ideas in it during the holidays, that's something pretty good I guess, at least we are not going to meet with an empty mind staring each other with a puzzled face wondering what to do.

That night, we met, and that one guy was missing. The 7th guy.

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Well, we checked the WhatsApp messages history, and he did read the messages, up till the one we talked about the meetup. That means, he know about the meetup, but did not show up.

Interesting.

During class, some of us went and talked to him about it, and he agreed on joining the next meetup. Good. Problem solved.

Except that it didn't.

The next night, we met again to fix some stuff and get a little more progress. He did not show up, and we were a little frustrated - hey, like really, we can do it on our own, 6 people is sufficient for it, but can you at least show that you are trying to be responsible even if you don't want to? Whatever, we picked up our own parts of the assignment and started working on it. Later on, my friend messaged him in a direct message asking why he didn't show up.

"Hey, where were you? We was having the discussion just now."
"Sorry I missed it, apparently taking a nap was a bad idea"

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Dang. How to blow your mind in university.

Then, we met a few more times - with every single time notifying everyone in the group first. The messages were delivered to his phone, but is not marked as read. It's interesting because you cannot disable read notifications in group chats, and he uses his phone a little too frequently for us to not believe that he is too busy to pick it up. My guess is he purposely did not click into the chat, since that will not register it as read, but hey, we know that you actually saw that there are unreads...

Until today, he never joined any discussions and we are actually done with the whole thing. I mean, if we didn't do that, we would be dead because the deadline is so near. We are actually waiting for him to take some action so we can do some justification - it is up to us to write his name in the submission form or not. This assignment is worth 70% of the total marks of the course, so if we really do so, he will fail the course like immediately. The one responsible to write the names and do the final printing is a girl - and she is the savagest among all of us. I can already foresee her happily ignoring his presence when doing the printing...welp.

It's been a frustrating week because we are actually puzzled if we should do anything to fix it. I mean, we tried, but he is not showing up and is contributing absolutely nothing to the whole thing. Part of us think that he deserves that 0, part of us think that it is better to not find trouble with anyone and do the explanation, but come on - in any sense, he is as grown up as we are. He needs the sense of responsibility. I guess that girl will give him the 0 he deserves when she does the printing...yea.

Here's what I want to say: No matter what group you are in, if you are responsible for something, you need to be responsible for it. Being responsible is the least thing you can do and it is actually easy. Don't be a dick and make others' lives hard - they don't deserve it. Reserve the trouble to yourself.

Right, time to sleep, I still have class at 8am tomorrow, getting enough sleep is a type of responsibility too.

See you next time!

--Lilacse