The HACCP zombie

"$%&#@! HACCP!"

I got a surprise phonecall from one of my lecturers yesterday, telling me that the group HACCP assignment I did along with 3 other group members for FOOD3017 was missing a crucial table, hence we'd all got a really crap mark. She said it would make a difference to my overall mark, my friend Nicole's mark and our other group member Thuy's mark, presumably because the quality of the rest of our work was such that we'd all be getting much higher marks if it wasn't for this one assignment. She offered us the chance to hand in the table and get an improved mark for the assignment, and thus hopefully the subject overall. As for the group member whose responsibility I thought the table was, I was told that even if the assignment mark improves it probably won't make any difference to her mark, presumably because she didn't put much effort into anything else, either.

So the HACCP assignment was brought back from the dead and I did the table. Thuy offered to work on it too, but when I tried to email her the (massive) HACCP assignment file it overflowed her inbox and bounced back. Thuy probably did more work than any of us, and Nicole helped me out when I had my massive literature review due the same day as the HACCP assignment, so I don't mind, and they'll be checking it before we hand it in. Regardless of whether the marks make a difference to our other group member's mark, I'd still rather she didn't get any credit for it. She was sick for a while at the end of semester and broke up with her boyfriend or something, but I had a bad feeling right from the beginning of semester when she whinged about her last group work experience. And now she supposedly doesn't know anything about the blank HACCP table despite me having an email from her a few days before the due date, saying she was working on it. I thought that perhaps with all the overflowing inboxes she might have tried to email it and it didn't get through, but it just appears that she didn't even do it. Grrr.

I really do prefer working on my own and taking responsibility for my own work rather than somebody else's. At least if I do crappily I have only myself to blame. Gam says we should have 'group contracts' so it is well defined what every group member has to take responsibility for. I used to think that was kind of excessive, but that was because all my group work experiences up until now have been good ones.

It's not even like I expected a good mark for this assignment, but I did expect to pass!

I'm also pissed off at myself for not noticing it was missing when I emailed the assignment to the lecturer. In my defence, I had the 5000 word lit review due the same day, so I probably wasn't all there. Still, stupid me.

On the other hand, I'm grateful for the decency of the lecturer in taking the time to find out what went wrong and giving us a chance to salvage our marks for this subject. I know how crappy an experience Gam has had with some of the lecturers in his faculty, and it only makes me more grateful for the good ones we have in mine.