Over the weekend I went shopping and lunching with a dear friend we’ll call Friend. She is a highly regarded professional in her field doing advanced graduate work. We took turns kvetching about our current education frustrations, mine being documented most recently in Get Out of the Room, and she brought me up to speed on hers saying I could call 9-wah-wah if the whining got too loud.
It seems that the students in her program were paired off to do a big paper/presentation and Friend got teamed with a guy named Darren. He didn’t seem profoundly motivated but she had confidence it would work out. They were all professionals, right? Famous last words along the lines of “Don’t worry, I packed the parachute myself.”
Friend completed her half and emailed him for his contribution so she could put it all together. No response. More emails were followed by persistent stalling. He was very busy. This was not his priority. Stop pressuring him. No, she didn’t understand, he was REALLY busy.
The due date was looming and Friend needed to vent so she forwarded his latest annoying email to a few classmate friends asking what they would do in her place. Figuring everyone had gone through the group-project nightmare by the time they were in eighth grade, Friend hoped someone would have a suggestion. One classmate responded, “What a loser” and instead of clicking Reply she hit Reply All so the original writer of what was forwarded also received her comment. The classmate’s inbox soon contained an email saying, “I’ll be seeing you after class” signed “Darren the loser.”
So it wasn’t eighth grade at all. It was seventh.
Friend took a bite of her pizza and continued. The paper got handed in at deadline after more tense and evasive correspondence. Shortly thereafter, Friend and Darren were summoned to the instructor’s office. Part of the paper, they were informed, was plagiarized. The instructor acknowledged Friend’s work ethic and diligence and said it was too bad she had not brought the team’s problems to the instructor’s attention beforehand. Now Friend’s name was right there on the page. In academia, as in the rest of the world, if you sign it, you’re in it.
Friend was aghast. She is maniacally honest. She is like me only better. When we see a woman on the street wearing terrific shoes, Friend will say, “I wonder if I could find those online” while I’’m thinking, “I wonder if I could knock her down and grab them without onlookers identifying me.”
As a mother, Friend had spent her life raising children with strong values, reinforcing time and again the importance of honesty and character: don’t do drugs; always use a condom; lying is bad; cheating is worse. Lessons we know well and live always no matter what our names are on.
Friend: Can you believe this crap?
OSV: It’s a good story.
We looked at each other over our pizza.
OSV: I’’ll change the names.
Daughter’s Featured Fotos taken at the Museum of Natural History are One Word Wonders
unicorn
dude!
lunch
noel