On Tuesdays and Thursdays my morning class begins painfully early. The class starts at 7:30 sharp and we almost always start with a quiz. This means that if you’re 10 minutes late, you miss the quiz, and there are no makeups, period. Living 30 miles of solid traffic away from school means I’ve already missed 2 quizzes this year for being late and let’s not forget the 3 from being stuck at home with an enormous spinal fluid leak. As if you could forget.

Anyways, so I’ve been getting to school earlier lately to try to avoid the quiz missage, and so far, so good. I’ve found that if I leave the house at 5:55, I get to school by 6:45. If I leave at 6:10, I get there at 7:20. The time-space continuum is severely disrupted on the 10 freeway.

On Tuesday, I arrived at 6:45, got to my classroom by 6:50. In fact, I got there before the professor. He let me in a few minutes later and shortly thereafter another student arrived and sat down at a desk in the front of the room with the professor. They began talking about the other student’s midterm and I realized that this was a pre-scheduled meeting and that perhaps I should step out to give him privacy. I didn’t really have to, but I know I wouldn’t want other people listening in on my midterm discussions, especially if I hadn’t done well. I grabbed my notes and sat down in the hallway.

A few minutes later another of my classmates came to the classroom and asked if the door was locked. I told him that it was open, but that (the student) and our professor were having a meeting about the midterm. He understood and stayed in the hallway with me. We studied silently for about 5 minutes before 3 other students walked up. 2 of them, let’s call them Tweedledee and Tweedledum are good friends, and they are the “gunners.” They are the students who are happy to trample anyone else down if it helps them succeed. I sit behind Tweedledee in a few of my classes and I’ll be honest, I don’t care for her. She can be quite nice, she can also be a tremendous asshole.

Tweedledee walked up and let out a HUGE sigh, and blurted out, “You’ve got to be kidding me. It’s locked?” Without missing a beat, Tweedledum echoed her previous statement about this being ridiculous and I calmly stated that it wasn’t locked, but that our classmate was having the meeting, and yadda yadda yadda, and DUDE, it’s only 7 oh freaking 5. You have 25 minutes before the quiz, chill the hell out.

And before I could finish my sentence, Tweedledee looks at me and says, “Who the hell cares about his test? I’m going in. He can deal, it’s not my problem.”

And with that, Tweedledee and Tweedledum burst into the room, mid-meeting, and I was left in the hallway with 2 other classmates, all 3 of us stood there totally speechless. I mean, it’s one thing if this was happening 5 minutes before class, but we had 25 minutes and there’s an empty unlocked room next door that they could go into.

I could not believe the audacity of my classmates. I cannot believe that they care so much more about themselves than about giving one of their peers some respect, some common courtesy. It’s funny, because I’m in the same program, at the same school, and I would love nothing more than for all my classmates to succeed. All but one of our classes is graded on a standard non-curve scale, so there’s no reason to want others to not do really well too.

I just feel like there are already enough things standing in the way to success, it’s wrong in so many ways, on so many levels, to become another barrier. And no matter how competitive things get, I refuse to halt someone else’s success.

Even if that means not baking laxative brownies for Tweedledee and Tweedledum the day before finals start.

I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a little tempting.

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