writing a report the gang-bang way

I’ve never enjoyed ‘group’ reports. Making concessions, coming to agreements, and finding a happy medium, are things that just don’t seem to be strengths of mine. It’s not that I’m hard to get along with, just that I’m usually right.

So when faced with a group report for the mid-term project in my Business Policy class, I was less than enthusiastic. Granted, group projects usually mean less work. Except that I’m never happy with the portions done by the other members, which usually means that I volunteer to be the one who consolidates the whole thing, which usually means that I end up creating more work for myself than if I had just done the whole thing alone. And having many years of group project experience, I’ve found that most people phrase sentences awkwardly, can’t spell, and can’t support the arguments they’ve made…all of which usually leaves a lot of editing, revising, and re-writing for the moron that agreed to revise the whole paper…which is usually me.

To make matters all the more fun, the professor for the class is an idiot…which seems to be the trend at the college I decided to attend. Our professor, Dave Slante, isn’t a professor by trade. Oh no, when talking about night classes, the quality of professor you get is much lower on the educational scale than at a ‘real’ university. Here, you have ‘professionals’ who, once their normal day job is complete, come to campus to teach. Dave is a landscaper during all those sunlight hours. Yes, a landscaper. Which basically means that Dave cuts grass and shovels snow for a living. And this is who I’m paying thousands of dollars to teach me Business Policy. I could just as easily have gotten the 16 year old next door, who also cuts grass and shovels snow, to instruct me in all matters of business…but as everyone knows, if it’s not costing you an arm and a leg, it’s not really education.

And Business Policy by Dave is not so much ‘Business Policy’ as it is a four hour weekly lecture on ‘Wal-Mart’. Dave loves Wal-Mart and can speak for hours on end, all without taking a single breath, about how blades for his lawn mowers are so much cheaper there, how Wal-Mart is revolutionizing business, and how Wal-Mart will probably bring about world peace. Naturally, the topic for our mid-term project is Wal-Mart.

So, I met with my group, Susan and the other Susan, on Sunday to construct a seven page ode to Wal-Mart. The two Susans, who have worked together in the past, instructed me on the working relationship that has been foraged. “We'll throw out ideas and Susan will do the typing,” the other Susan told me, “because she has a great way of wording things.”

I soon found out that Susan’s ‘great way of wording things’ is synonymous with ‘plagiarizing’, which, I suppose, is why things sound so good when she writes them. Namely because someone else already did the writing for her.

And as I sat, for the better part of Sunday afternoon, in the one Susan’s living room while the other Susan typed, I made a mental list of all the things I could have bought with the money that I’ve sunk into this worthless degree. Like a new car. Or a trip to the Caribbean. Or a personal assistant who could have smacked me each time I began thinking that returning to school was a wise decision.