#^$*@# – A pissy rant

I am so pissed right now I am vibrating with anger. My physics lab partner, who’s been dragging his heels all damn term, missed our lab, the lab he is supposed to be doing, this morning.

A couple of weeks ago, NSBE was invited to a plant trip at Caterpillar, and Daniel said he wanted to go. I didn’t give a damn–a tour of a Caterpillar plant is for the Mechanical and Chemical engineers, but I’d tag along. I agreed to arrange a make-up lab with our lab prof, and made sure I was set with my other missed classes. I was up at the ass-crack of dawn (05:20) to go on the plant trip, sick from a cold and barely able to keep food down. Guess what negro didn’t show up? Turns out he had a computer programming night exam that evening. These things are schedules weeks in advance. To top it off, the fuck up didn’t even go to lab while he was here and I was stuck cavorting around a plant. He didn’t want to go because I wasn’t there. Now, given that I ran my labs all by my damn self, did all the write-ups my damn self (and got us decent grades), and still helped his lazy ass on his first lab, he could have felt perfectly fucking free to take some damned initiative without me holding his hand. Instead, he slept in.

Fine, so we still have a scheduled make-up lab for today. It started, however, during my last class, and I have enough absenses in there to actually matter (plus, we’re talking about Langston Hughes, who is quite the man), so I told him to start without me, and I’d show up the next hour.

Class is over, I go down to the lab, and can’t find him. The prof isn’t in there at the time, so I come back to my room and see he’s online, but idle. Online. Meaning his computer is not in the laboratory, taking measurements, which I already knew. So I stomp up to his room (and boy, did the path clear when people saw my face…), and there he is, having a good time “chillaxing” (I cannot believe that non-word is becoming a part of my speech.). Options included snatching his ass out of bed onto the floor and yelling at him while pummelling with feet or fists, or just leaving and having a friendly chat with my lab prof to get our grades separated (which would certainly boost my average). I managed to find a middle ground upon seeing the fearful look on his roommate’s face, and attempted to get out a coherent sentence explaining that fourth hour does, in fact, begin earlier than the present time and that labs are not held in residence halls. I may have sputtered a bit. Just a bit.

Conversely, my chemistry lab partner got better over the quarter, and managed to run our lab yesterday smoothly. The lab was actually interesting–we’re studing integrated rate laws, and essentially watched a cube of CO₂ sublimate for a half hour, taking mass readings every thirty seconds. Kinda tedious, but our data turned out to be a sexy smooth curve.