Helen is hardly working

I’ve just finished a very stressful project so I’m very happy, and I thought I’d do an update before heading off to the pub. I’m celebrating by eating cake and drinking coffee whilst sitting listening to Super Furry Animals (the right kind of multitasking!).

The first module in my course was all about sustainability, which is about ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. I was glad it was first because it’s something I’m really into, and it sounds like a good way to start the course…then I realised how the course was going to be marked…100% group coursework, 8000 words, in a week and a half. Urrrrrggggh. Blimey I’ve had the same thought many times over the last couple of weeks, which is that if you gauged my stress levels with an emergency light on top of my head (signalling ‘danger’) it would have been going off constantly for 10 days. I had a lovely team but we had some very unfortunate miscommunications at the start (a poor Spanish guy called David has had a baptism of fire into the English language, I don’t think he’d be out of his depth at a football match with the expletives that I’ve uttered over the last few days, sorry David). Couple the miscommunications with reams and reams of information to gather, assimilate and make sense out of and you’re starting to get the picture. I’ve been working for all the 16 hours of the day several times, was in the library until half 11 last night and I didn’t spend one minute staring at the ceiling feeling bored. On the up side:
- I can write references in my sleep
- I’ve learnt quite a lot about the Greek language and
- I’ve learnt that when an Indian person shakes their head they actually mean yes. Oh how we laughed about that one.
- I’ve probably lost a couple of pounds through stress. Although I’ve undoubtedly put that on again through cake.
We finally handed our coursework in at 4.20pm this afternoon, having had a last minute panic because our PDF file was too big to upload (honestly, they could have told us there was a 2MB limit at the start). Luckily our Nigerian group member kept his head and while the rest of the group was running round frantically trying to reduce the file size he calmly downloaded a file compressor, compressed the file and handed it to me, at which point I uploaded it and sat back. We’re all still friends amazingly. And apparently we weren’t the last people to hand our work in :)

Time for the pub I think!