Life Musings

Sometimes people can be most lazy in their communication. This can be really aggravating.

I remember this one research project from my grad school days. In addition to our written annual report, we also had to prepare a video summary of our work for our corporate sponsor, so the grad students were tasked with preparing scripts for their particular contributions. One guy (let's call him "Sarge") simply handed me his section of the written report. He very bluntly said, "That's good enough. Why make more work for myself?" Now if you have anything beyond a sixth-grade education, you know that a written report requires an entirely different style from a video script. His "good enough" was not, and while he saved time for himself, he did so by deliberately foisting more work onto other people.

Or this fellow with whom I worked on a project for Spanish class. When he submitted his contribution, it was obvious that he didn't even both conjugating his verbs! No, he just strung a bunch of root words together and expected the editor to straighten it out. Lazy.

Or C.B., this other grad student that I worked with. We were both supposed to give presentations on our MS thesis work at a NASA conference. I spent all night preparing some rather detailed slides for my presentation. What did he do? He simply projected a copy of his paper up onto the screen, pointed to some sentences, and then talked about his work. Needless to say, the audience could barely read the prit, and they had a hard time focusing on whichever topics he addressed. Lazy, lazy, lazy!

I also remember this one fellow who had the following text (or something like it) as his USENET posting signature: "Don't complain to me about my spelling or grammar. What, do you think that I have time to proofread my posts?" So he didn't have time to proofread his own words, so he felt that other people should invest the extra effort necessary to figure out what he meant to say. And yes, his sentences were often difficult to decipher. I wonder how he would have reacted if somebody had (understandably) misinterpreted what he said. Would he have complained about the amount of time lost in straightening out what he meant to say?