Something truly horrendous happened to me today.
I'm one of these people that swims through academia, often getting between the minimum to average grades of the class, but always, ALWAYS passing. My Scottish Higher results were just enough to scrape through to uni and my university degree was a bog standard 2:1. I don't mind this, in fact I quite like it; I'm intelligent enough to do an average amount of work and gain an average grade at a higher education level. This is sufficient.
Many of my friends that I've met along the way are much more academic than me. They swim through academia achieving the highest grade possible, getting awards for being extraordinarily clever, having stacks of money thrown at them for their endless intelligence and immense skills. This is also good; I like to surround myself with intelligent people. One uni housemate of mine played the cello, spoke fluent Spanish, pretty good French and a little bit of Russian and Mandarin Chinese. She got 90-100% in almost every exam. That's great; go her.
I often find that people who are so high achieving at an academic level have, at times, limited common sense in relation to the rest of us.
And this brings me back to the horrendous thing that happened today. One fellow ex-struggling journalist is universally adored by lecturers and tutors. They even read her blog. She gets the best results on the course. She makes actual real money from journalism. She was the first of us to get a proper job. She's one of these intelligent types who, with a bit of luck and a bit of perseverance, does better than the rest of us. Pretty clever; but what she did today was unforgivable.
She hacked into our course leader's e-mail account, and sent me an e-mail, claiming there had been a mix up with my given results, and I had actually failed all of my exams.
It was pretty believable. I believed it.
Apparently it was a 'joke' in which I was supposed to open said e-mail in the company of her and fellow students, and believe it for all of five second. What actually happened was: I opened it in a private room, alone, let it sink in and realised the horror; I have failed. Everything. I'm not stupid. I work reasonably hard. I have never failed anything before. The others were supposed to tell me it was a joke, but I was so traumatised I grabbed my bag, flounced out the room before anyone said anything, and burst into tears on the stairs.
I met her on the way to the office, where I was going to shout at them about this awful mistake. She felt very guilty and bought me jelly babies.
That'll learn her.
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2 comments:
:(
I apologise for teaching her how to do that, but it's really simple so you can go share the pain if you like...
I'm sorry , jenny. I still feel very very guilty.
Considering it backfired so badly, I think you took it extremely well. Not many people would have been laughing about that after only 10 mins.
AND - you do yourself down in that blog. Why would you do that? Have I destroyed your self-belief forever.....? Damn it
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