You know what? I’ve changed my mind already. One of you fuckups will certainly be too incompetent even to fellate someone properly. I know the other two or three of you are probably articulate but introverted engineers, who will work hard and turn in passable portions of your project… but I also know that one of you Just Doesn’t Get It. Worse, it’s possible that in the random draw I will magically be assigned to a team with the one who Just Doesn’t Give a Fuck. If I can’t trust you with my grades, I’m not putting my wang anywhere near you.
I’m shocked that the professors pretend not to know that their classes have a slacker population close to 20%, because it must be obvious to them, semester after semester, that Steve-A-Rino there in the back row with his Con/GlomTech polo shirt is just in this class to check the box. He’s going to make lower middle management just by marking time, and he’s going to get the B+ he needs because he knows that I want an A, and he is hitching his wagon to my goddamn shining ball of incandescent rage. When he gets up and presents his portion of the work at the end of the semester, it should be obvious to a jar of pudding that he didn’t do an ounce of real fucking work, and the reason he can’t pronounce those words is because they’re from a higher primate’s vocabulary!
So first, a big “fuck you” to professors who assign “role playing team scenarios” instead of homework. I’m in graduate school now, but I have a full-time job. I spent four years in undergraduate school and five years in the Air Force getting assigned to random teams to prove that I had learned the Seven Steps of Super Teams or the Five Pillars of Effective Leadership or the Three Phases of Getting Fucked Over By Slacker Assmaggots. In the six years I’ve been in the work force – and out of all the real and fake teams I’ve been assigned to – the very worst real-world team was hundreds of times easier to work with than the best fake team I’ve ever been on. Do you want to know why? Because on every real team I’ve been assigned to, we were all getting paid to do the work, and even slackers need to eat.
Group projects don’t measure the best work that a team can do. They measure the most work that a team is able to create the appearance of having performed, given five students’ extracurricular schedules, family lives, work and travel schedules, and how those arcane astrological events align with the totally unpredictable and essentially arbitrary changes in the syllabus. And when all five of us lucky-random-lotto-new-best-friends-for-life align our schedules and meet for the one hour we all have free, I guarantee you that one of us will be late, one of us will have to leave early, and only one or two of us will be willing to take the initiative and drive the rest of the team to divide up the work in something approaching a fair division of labor. Even supposing we come up with a fair way to distribute the work, our favorite goat-felching slacker – who must be counting his lucky stars! – is figuring out whether his fantasy football league meeting during the playoffs is important enough to skip the presentation for. He might be considerate enough to e-mail one of us his half-assed attempt to do his share of the work, and if he does, it will be with a bleary hung-over sounding e-mail (how do you ratfuckers make E-MAIL read like a hangover? did you pour gin on your goddamn keyboard while you were quote-unquote-working?) an hour or two before class.
I’m sick of getting stuck with apathetic mouth-breathers who are just there to fill a goddamn seat, but I’d be fine with letting him “live and let live” in the back of class, watching the dust settle on his pen, pencils, eyelids, and brain stem (where applicable). But when my grade is dependent on their ability to comprehend the material and their willingness to convert that comprehension into something that a literate sapient being would interpret as “written communication”, I begin to get seriously and deeply pissed. Slackers can’t help their nature – they’re slackers, they suck, and they deserve their B-minuses and Cs. As long as they’re stuck on my team, I reserve the right to bitch about them, because they’ve just become responsible for my grade.
The real assholes, the true villains, are the so-called instructors who distribute the slackers evenly. Those lazy bastards are letting “paying customers” walk away with degrees that they didn’t earn. You lazy, spineless, unethical weasel shits should stop forcing me to pull deadweight just so you don’t have to grade a full set of assignments, or god forbid, step up and actually fail someone who’s clearly a failure. It’s gutless pigeon farts like you that invented the “Gentleman’s C”, so I’m giving you all the “Curmudgeon’s F” – F all of you, right in the eye sockets, with a rolled up final report. I hope you get a papercut on your brain.