Assignment Horror stories

Well yesterday I was happily working away on the most boring and pointless assignment. We had to provide a preliminary report for a developer who wants to build on a plot of land. Touching on environmental issues (slope, waterways, native wildlife, invasive species) and then relate it to 3 pieces of legislation (One international, one commonwealth and one state). Anyway so I had properly formatted about 3/4 of it and then my computer froze, I was like meh I'll just wait it out, then the blue screen of death showed up and shut down my computer! I switched my computer back on to be presented with the 4 worst words you want to see when doing an assignment on a computer "NO OPERATING SYSTEM FOUND". Went into the BIOS setup and it said i had nothing on my harddrive. I was so annoyed but I had saved it to my external harddrive, however my computer took it with it and reformatted that as well. So now i have to do this bullshit assignment again, I've had 2 hours sleep in the past 48 hours, I'm afraid to take any more Red Bull or stimulants for fear of doing something terrible to my body.

So i guess I want to also hear your horrible stories with assignments or just rubbish assignments in general?
God Damn it i am so annoyed

[-Michael-]

I stayed up 3 days doing my photography coursework

I got a phone call today saying if i didn't have more in by frieday

i'm getting shot out of college


I've failed life.

For a second I thought it was a thread about assignments for school concerning horror stories haha -I entered happily 'cause I love horror stuff.

I think the worst thing that happened to me was forgetting at home an assignment I had worked a lot on.

[Cheria]

Originally Posted by Mysterons

For a second I thought it was a thread about assignments for school concerning horror stories haha -I entered happily 'cause I love horror stuff.

So did I.
And pretty much every assignment is a horror story to me.

This didnt happend to me but I read it on FML.com. This guy/girl was throwing a party because they had just finished their Graduate dissertation (what is needed to graduate graduate college). Somehow the cmputer fell from the top of the stairs and was obliterated. They went to check the back up on the USB and they found it on the floor, someone had crushed it. It was due the following morning.

[Greggers]

I had to render my 3D animation final project worth 80% of my mark, and basically when i rendered it the first time it didnt work, the second time the transparent objects were solid grey, third time the transparent objects were solid grey, and the fouth time it didnt work again, and so the 5th time i cut ALL the transparent objects in half so it was like a cross section so the transparency didnt matter.

Each of these renders? 3+ hours to do.

I did this the NIGHT OF.

I didnt sleep, i had to drive to school at 6:30 am and stay till 6:45 pm.

*cry*

[Lychee]

I haven't really had anything too bad happen to me, mainly coz all my teachers love me, and are fine if I don't hand stuff in on the day it's due.

It goes both ways though - I once stayed up literally ALL night doing this massive assignment for school, and then I got there and no one else had done it in my class, so the teacher cancelled it. Boy was I annoyed...

[Eleanor Rigby]

There was that day I have an assignment for my french course. Everything was going fine, until the printer didn't print. I became half mad and was unable to find what was wrong and couldn't reach my boyfriend because he had turn his cell-phone off. So I call my brother in law who tried to help me as much as he could from 800 km of distance, but nothing worked. By this time I became completle mad and I called one of my best friend and started to cry on the phone. Fortunaltly, he is a very good friend so he told me to calm down, and he came to pick me at home (I didn't had a car at that time) drove me to his home so I could print my stuff and drove me to university so I won't be late.

[Apocalypte]

This is NOT a good thread to read when my senior thesis is due at midnight tonight.

[davo-man]

Not a good thread to read for me either...Got two major assignments due tomoro at 5 pm They are made of pure, unadulterated evil concentrate. Don't ever attempt to learn Java, people

[Apocalypte]

Originally Posted by davo-man

Don't ever attempt to learn Java, people

If Java scares you, don't even think about trying to learn C. *shudder*

[Kenko]

I don't have any really good disaster stories.
Once I had to do a "creative project" for Biology class. So I decided to do a website. "Conveniently" the server was down for a couple days after I passed in the URL.

I've had several all-nighters or near all-nighters, but for big projects I make a point of saving often, and saving copies all over the place. Hard drive, USB drive, email, other email, etc (if it's a computer based project).

Once Solid Edge wasn't cooperating with my piece of shit Intel 815 "graphics adapter" and kept crashing. I pretty much broke my mouse smashing it against the desk... at 3AM... the day before the final project was due that I was making up drawings for. Eventually I found an option for software rendering and was able to continue.

My last couple "big projects" I was impressed. We had them finished a couple days before the due date. It is then fun to laugh at the tired people scrambling to make letters of transmittal at 11:45AM when it's due at noon. Or when the computer lab's printer breaks down at 11:30.

Originally Posted by Apocalypte

If Java scares you, don't even think about trying to learn C. *shudder*

Pffft. Assembly for the win. Nothing like coding right on bare metal for an 68HC11 microcontroller. And optimizing by using registers instead of pulling values from RAM to shave off CPU cycles.

Or manually compiling assembly to the machine code, so you can make a self-modifying program.

I made a musical robot in C. Walk in the park compared to ASM.

[Amy]

Honours World History (AKA-History of the Western World)
California will become its own independent nation and the citizens get to vote on which governmental system they want. (Which is hilarious as that is a democratric process and one of the choices was oligarchy.) Design a campaign and make two videos, an essay, and a poster for your campaign. One video must promote your system and the other mucst show the negative effects of other systems.
Projects must be done in groups of four to five. All group members must participate. ( Yea, right)

I got in a group of five with one of my best friends. We did almost everything. The only thing she and I did not do was the poster. That responsibility was given to some girl whose name I cannot even remember. We even drew out a plan of what we needed the poster to have for her. The videos took fucking forever. We went to the community college and filmed there. I actually got my ASL teacher to sign in it as we were pushing the fact that democracy allows diversity in government. We spent almost five hours editing that night as well as learning how to edit. My friend wrote the essay, which wasn't as amazing as the videos because it is very hard to beat Simon and Garfunkel's The Sound of Silence. Really.
We get to school the next morning to turn in our project and everything is perfect.
Except for one thing.
The heading of the poster read:
DEOMCRACY
:head desk:





But we did win.
And, in high school, that's what really counts.

[xequar]

I think the closest I had to a disaster was my sophomore year of college... I had a 9:00 a.m. class that ran until 11, and someone asked me about a research paper due in a class we both had at 3:00 p.m.

Minor issue-I hadn't started it yet.

So, after class, we went and grabbed some lunch. I had to work at 1:00 p.m. in the building where my 3:00 class was, so I took my laptop to work with me and wrote a research paper. I had no internet access (it was 2001, so wireless wasn't exactly common then), so I literally conjured up research and fudged together some footnotes. By 2:45 I had the paper done, but the closest printer was in another building in a computer lab. So, I ran over there and managed to get onto the network. I wound up having to print to a printer in anoter lab because the one in the lab I was in was stuck trying to print 1000 copies of some asshole's frat party flyer.

At 3:05, I stopped outside the door to my class, took a moment to catch my breath and wipe the sweat off my brow, strolled in like I owned the joint, and handed the prof my paper.

Best part-I got an A- on the paper!

Ahhh yes the stories and memories are all coming back know. I have had 2 hours sleep in the past 2 days, I feel like shit, my mouth tastes of a mixture of taurine/guarana and mints and i just finished the legislation section, I'm on the home stretch people wishe me luck.

You know the best bit, it has to be bound and colour printed and I am going to another uni to get it printed and bound, why you ask? well cause the guy who works behind the counter is hot and that is a good enough reason! I am looking forward to it. once its all done I have to go and serve in the bar at the Australia vs. NZ rugby league match for 6 hours :P Fun for me, I;m going to have a great weekend

[joeyconnick]

I always always ALWAYS periodically email my Gmail account copies of major papers/assignments as I'm working on them (say at least every hour or so) so that I never have to worry about the bulk of the horror stories described here. I think everyone should adopt that practice--it would save a lot of heartache. In fact all of my email goes to about 2 or 3 different "places" just in case.

I feel really bad for people who've lost their assignments; that must be awful. I would go crazy if I lost something major right before it was due.

[Alex19]

the worst that happened to me was my research paper for english. not too hard, but it was very time consuming. like it took me about 3 or 4 days to complete. each day i plugged in anywhere from 3 to 5 hours. luckily my comp didnt crash, or else id have done something that would have put me in jail. lol

[Apocalypte]

Well, I submitted my senior thesis without incident. Nuts to you, fate-tempting thread.

[qisforquinton]

For a tech project last year, I made a christmas tree that lit up and played some generic carol. 5 minutes before I had to present it to the class, I dropped it. It broke in a ton of places, I had to run into the shop and re-solder a bunch of parts and try to recover what I could. To prevent it from falling again, I tied a piece of ribbon around it to hold it by. Of course, with my luck, the knot slips out and it falls AGAIN! I fixed it for the most part, but the power switch wouldn't work and, therefore, I couldn't shut it off. So, when I was presenting it, when I went to turn it off I discreetly pulled out the battery. Ended up with an A-, which under those circumstances, I was quite happy with.