Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Tad Troubling to the Ticker

Title just for Givinya, who has been enjoying my recent alliterative titles.

This one took a while.

I'm surprised I'm up to blogging.

Particularly summing up what I want to say in five words starting with the same letter.

You see, it is a study night and I'm supposed to be working on the reading for my second assignment. The plan is to finish the reading this week, then write it next in time for the deadline next Friday.

Okay, I've got to prepare a sermon for church on Sunday in the middle there somewhere, but as I'm sneakily using the same text as my assignment is on it should be the best researched sermon I've ever given, without taking up any extra time in the reading department.

So far that's fine.

Checked my email as I settled down to my desk. There were emails for a spate of Forum posts for the subject, so I'd better have a quick squizz.

One from the lecturer which included the words, "Friday is also the due date for Assignment 2, and ..."

I did not read the rest of the comment because my poor brain was fixated on the fact that Assignment 2, that I had marked in my diary as due on the 17th of September, was in fact due IN TWO DAYS TIME!!!!

The human brain is marvellous. It can race to top gear in a split second. People who think they are going to die speak of seeing their whole life flash before their eyes.

My brain can take in all that still needs to happen in the time frame and come up with the obvious answer that it is probably not possible, even though the lecturer had said Sunday evening was fine if we needed the weekend to finish (which wouldn't help me very much, because I have a service to prepare for).

Anyway, maybe I could get something submittable done with a couple of all nighters, and by not doing any more reading (leaving my Bibliography woefully short, unless I did the read-two-random-pages-in-each-of-the-remaining-books-and-hope-there's-something-I-can-reference thing).

My brain then flicked to wonder precisely how dumb it would sound to write and request an extention on the grounds that I can't read a Study Outline.

Then flicked to think that I needed to check the Study Outline, because I was certain it was the 17th not the 10th. I mean, I've done some dumb stuff before, but...

All this took about 0.3 seconds.

5 years of which was spent staring at the email in dawning horror.

Thankfully, the next email was from a concerned student who was certain that the due date was the 17th, not the 10th.

There was another on much the same topic.

And a response from the lecturer apologising because he had the date wrong.

How much did my blood pressure require the exercise?

... Approximately None!

2 comments:

Jess said...

Argh! You nearly gave ME heart failure just from reading that post! I was so happy to read that conclusion :D

Emily Sue said...

The heart - use it or lose it.

I had something similar happen at uni, only mine was because of highly ambiguous wording in the course outline. Lecturer rang me to say my assignment was 10 days overdue; I said no, it's not due for two weeks. Argh. Much discussion and a minor heart attack later and I had a week to do it.