Book project meltdown!

The BBQ Pit
1

Thursday our group book projects were due. Unfortunately, things are not looking good. Our book is more or less done right now (all we have to do is laminate and bind it), but one of the illustrators is having a snit because her pictures were not included in the final version, and she thinks that because she didn’t visually contribute anything as an illustrator, she won’t get credit for the project :rolleyes: I had told her, a month ago, to work with the other illustrator, and sort out who illustrates what. I also frequently reminded both illustrators that they need to work together! :mad: The girl in charge of binding had told the illustrators/layout person to make sure there are 1” margins, so nothing gets cut off in the spine and all the text and pictures are clearly visible. But the upset illustrator made all her illustrations/text right on the border of the pages :smack:

So she has stuck herself in an impossible situation. There is only two days for the layout person to take the PO’ed illustrator’s pictures, alter them so they have 1” margins, somehow work them into the book, and give them to the binder to bind into a finished product. :mad: She told me, “Its not fair that I made all these (mostly clipart) illustrations and you are not going to use them.” I told her, “In one of our previous meetings, I had said we should make more pictures than we actually need, so we can pick out the best ones. You did contribute by coming up with the idea of borders and mentioning useful clipart pictures, and I don’t think your grade will suffer just because none of your submissions made it to the finished product” She volunteered to be one of the illustrators in this project, but it is clear to me that she wasn’t really cut out for the job. I don’t mind working in group projects, but I really hate it when nearly everyone else in the group acts like just a bunch of mindless automatons, unable to contribute any ideas but more than willing to offer criticism and complain :mad:

2

Welcome to the real world. Oh, wait, you’re in college.

Welcome to the prelims for the real world.

3

Group projects have a special place in hell.

Last Spring, I had a group presentation to do for a class. The clique that initially formed the group decided on the topic without anyone else’s input. Fine, I could work with that. Then they told me what part I would research and present, even though it wasn’t the direction I wanted to go in…fine, as long as the entire group’s work turned out OK and we all got good grades, right?

I was out of town for Memorial Day weekend - two hours and about 150 miles out of town, in fact. About noon on Saturday, I received a call on my cell that the group was meeting one-time only on that day, at 1 pm! Goat-felching mother fuckers! I tried to calmly explain that I was nowehre in the vicinity and that a little warning would have been nice. I got the bitch treatment, was regarded by my group members as one of those “deadbeat” members, and was fortunate that they “let” me contribute my part of the work that I had done separate from them in time for the final presentation.

I HATE group projects!

Luck, Incubus. Think about the play instead. :slight_smile:

4

So, one of these days I’ll tell you about the group robotics project I did (4 members) where one of my partners was smoking about a half of pot each night, and as a result looked so shit when he bothered to turn up that he talked his way in to extra credit for being “ill”, while I and the other guy doing the software ended up getting deducted points for not psychically designing our software to cope for when his mechanical design failed in the final test.

Oh, I just did.

Yup, group projects suck. Even when you like the people you’re working with. Possibly even more so, then. You have my sympathy.

5

My friend is a ME major, and just finished a robotics project. The teacher made them all take the keirsey temperament sorter (used in businesses for placement purposes) to group them.

However, instead of selecting groups by the compatibility of the personalities, she grouped them so that every team would have at least one responsible person in it.

Which, in Nate’s group, was him. He was in the machine shop every spare second for weeks, and then one of his teammates didn’t even show up for the competition and blamed Nate for not telling him the date and time (nevermind that 149 other students got it right without Nate’s help). :smack:

6

Erk, not nice. Of course, “personality types” and all that shit is a whole other rant with me. Fuck Belbin, fuck Keirsey, fuck the twelve sexual (or was it psychological?) needs of Murray, fuck “plants” and “finishers” and all that godawful bollocks. Either you’re a useless tosser, or you’re not. And someone always is. Still, selecting groups specifically so that someone gets dicked on is a really stupid idea.

Of course, I complain, but I still enjoyed the hell out of the project. And I knew the software was good, because the thing worked fine the night before the test, i.e. when the sensors weren’t falling off.

7

Yeah, group projects in college do suck. But you’d better learn to deal with 'em, because in most professional jobs everything is done in groups, and the penalties for being useless deadwood are nowhere near as harsh.

8

I’m not too worried about this grade-wise. I mean, we could laminate/bind what we have and easily get an ‘A’. Ms. Complainer could even state (with all honesty) that she helped find/design the pictures. I’m mainly just pissed that she would be in such a snit at the last minute, never mentioning this at this 10+ Friday afternoon meetings.

The Editor was obsessed about sections of the book that were in ‘passive voice’ even though I tried very hard to avoid writing in the passive voice and wasn’t able to rephrase all the sentences in the way she wanted. However, I was able to tolerate it because even though the writer (me) and the editor (her) tossed the manuscript back and forth to each other, it improved greatly with each draft and actually looked like a children’s book when we were done. So she did her part in my opinion.

The layout designer wanted very badly to contribute early on, even though she had to wait until a manuscript was written and illustrations chosen before she could get an idea on how she wanted to split up the book. Since she had to kind of wait on us to do the design part, she played around with layouts in Microsoft PowerPoint to see what would look good, and the ideal number of pages in the book. She also gave us a TON of ideas for plot in the meantime. I was the writer, but I definitely wanted the concept to come from everybody’s ideas, not just mine. She was also at every meeting we arranged, and was the only person who called people on the telephone when e-mailing would take too long to get a response. For instance, when we gave her the manuscript to arrange into pages, she caught some typos both the editor and I missed. Rather than waiting until the next class meeting to tell us (which would have given us very little time to fix the problem) she called me that night and told me. This was very responsible of her, and I appreciate her concern. So she did her part too.

The binder also contributed lots of ideas to us, because her job was the last step in the project. Her dad had many of the book-binding materials, which saved us money. She also frequently e-mailed me, asking how the story writing was coming along. It was good to see that she was interested in what was going on, rather than simply doing nothing until her part of the job came around.

The first illustrator was coming up with doodles and ideas as soon as I suggested them to her. She also showed us her ideas and asked for feedback. By the time my manuscript was complete, she had TONS of illustrations, giving the layout designer a lot of flexibility to choose what picture should go where. She also e-mailed me asking me about important details about the story, so her illustrations meshed well with the text.

The second illustrator, unfortunately, developed an inferiority complex when she saw the first illustrator’s drawings. She said she couldn’t draw nearly as well, but instead of brainstorming something to do or coordinating her illustrations with the first illustrator, she became introverted, and simply didnt reply to anyone’s e-mails for a month :smack: Also, at meetings whenever I told her, “Start making illustrations now” she would always say, “I need to wait until you are done with the story first” :rolleyes: