University Blues: When Friendships Collide with Finals – A Scandalous AITA Tale!
Oh, darlings, settle in with a nice cup of tea—or perhaps something stronger—because Roger is about to spill some piping hot collegiate tea straight from the holy grail of drama: Reddit’s AITA thread.
Let’s paint a picture. You’ve got our narrator who we’ll call Jane, and Jane’s roommate, Sam. Both are university students knee-deep in the delightful purgatory known as finals week. These two are supposed to be comrades in arms, waging war against piling assignments, caffeine overdoses, and tyrannical professors. Now imagine this: there’s a looming 2,100-word essay that could either make or break your semester. Simple enough, right? Wrong. This is the battleground where friendships could either blossom or wither under the weight of procrastination and negligence.
The Calm Before the Storm
Jane and Sam are both enrolled in the same class, one that requires this fateful essay. Sam, convinced their professor hates her (a tale as old as time), is perpetually on edge. She’s waiting to be crushed by unjust grading. Jane, on the other hand, has her academic life organized like a top-tier Marie Kondo disciple. She even has this quirky-but-golden rule of setting her deadlines a day early. Smart, eh? Helps her avoid the constant panic most of us are oh-so-familiar with.
While Jane is clacking away at her essay, Sam is—wait for it—binge-watching her favorite series. When Jane asks her if she plans to even glance at the essay, Sam reassures her with a dismissive, “I’ll do it later.” Oh sweet summer child, if only.
The Brewing Tension
Jane, being the good roommate, continues to pester Sam, a.k.a polite nagging. After a few days of this, Sam throws down her Netflix remote and effectively says, “Lay off!” With Jane’s habit of finishing things early, she wraps up her essay by her self-imposed deadline, June 9th at 11:59 PM (chef’s kiss for punctuality). Sam, however, plans to enter full-on panic mode on June 10th, when she believes the assignment is due at 11:59 PM.
Here’s the kicker, the deadline, as plainly stated in the official assignment instructions, is 11:00 AM on June 10th. Yes, you read that right—morning. But poor Sam’s sleep schedule conceives of mornings as some terrible mythical creature best avoided. She wakes up past the deadline, the reality of which dawns on her faster than her hopelessly unstarted essay could ever write itself.
Predictably, Sam loses it—First, with herself, and then, of course, with Jane. Oh, the betrayal! The deflection! The name-calling and the blame game!
Original story
So my friend, I’ll call Sam, and I are currently in our university finals week of this school year, and there is one class we share. In this class, Sam is convinced the professor dislikes her and is marking her down on her other classwork because of his bias (I don’t know if this is true).
Our final was a minimum 2,100 word essay utilizing the papers and resources discussed throughout the semester, so it isn’t supposed to be a drawn out research paper with tons of outside sources. We were told about this paper at the beginning of the semester and were advised by the instructor to start it last week because no late submission would be accepted.
I write down the due dates of all of my projects and essays one day early as a way to trick myself into not turning any in late (sometimes it works), and Sam knows this. This has caused Sam to not ask me when things are due because she says she works best under a time crunch, and I’ll usually give her a different day.
While I was working on my essay four days ago, I asked Sam, who was watching a show, if she was going to work on hers. She told me she would start it later and that she would be fine, so I let it go.
The following day I was working on my essay, and I would ask her about her essay, but eventually, she got fed up with my “nagging” and told me to stop asking her about it.
I completed my essay by the deadline I had given myself, June 9th at 11:59 pm, and turned it in. During all of our other projects for the class, the deadline was 11:59 pm on the due date; however, apparently, for the final, the due date was 11:00 am on June 10th.
Sam had planned on cramming her paper during the 10th, but since she is a late sleeper, she didn’t wake up until well past 11:00 am, causing her to miss the turn-in time. When she woke up she realized that she had missed the time and got super upset.
The final essay is worth 25% of our total grade, and since it will be going in as a zero she will likely either fail or barely pass the class because of her current grade. She asked me if I knew about the 11:00 am deadline and I told her that I had forgotten about it, but she didn’t believe me.
She told me that it was my fault that she was going to fail and that I should have told her the turn-in time because the professor would have found any excuse to knock down her grade.
In fairness, the turn-in time is explicitly stated in the Word doc instructions document the professor shared, but I had changed the due date and time on my copy as soon as I got it. On our University’s classes website (We don’t use Canvas, but something similar), you can find the time the submission page closes, so I could have found the official turn it time and told her.
So AITA for not telling her the turn in deadline for the paper?