Group projects can really be the pits…

We’ve all been there before and you know that certain folks aren’t gonna pull their weight…

So what can you do?

Well, get revenge, of course!

Check out the story below!

You Make Me Do All The Science Fair Project!

So this story happened when I was in 7th grade.

During that time the school district had all students participate in a mandatory annual Science Fair, from Elementary school up to the end of Middle school.

The idea was to get students interested in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) fields and occupations.

They knew the routine.

After participating in Science Fairs for 6 years I was used to the usual rigmarole that a science fair project entailed: I come up with some, hopefully unique, project ideas (most likely the very original “Electricity from a potato” project), I make a hypothesis, collect data, pay the school or Home Depot $10 – $20 for a science fair board, tape up charts and diagrams to the board the night before presenting, and then rinse and repeat for the next year. However, this year my class was doing things a little differently.

My class had the honor of being the first to be selected to participate in a virtual science fair. So basically we were voluntold. No one in our section of the district at that time did a virtual science fair before, so we were signed up as Guinea Pigs to test it out. If that wasn’t good enough my class also had to promote healthy collaboration amongst students, so we were assigned to do projects in a group!

Now I don’t like group work! I always got the short end of the stick in a group. Either my group gets stuck with someone that skimps out on work and the other group members and I have to cover their portion OR everyone in the group except me avoids work like the plague and no matter how much I urge them to participate I eventually have to do all the work myself to maintain my precious grades.

I was a straight-A student at the time so any group work assigned to me was a threat to my grade and my sanity. If I ever got less than an A on any assignment my mother would ask me “Why didn’t you get an A? Sonny boy do you need help at school”. It drove me insane since I wasn’t failing!

Anyways, the online science fair was pretty simple. As a group, we were assigned access to a group “Science fair board” that we could fill out with our results, figures, hypothesis, etc. We were to have certain parts of the project like the Discussion done by particular dates to get points towards our grade.

The overall project was due in two months and then we were to give a presentation. Amazing Teacher was brilliant. She wanted us to record our project progress in a composition book in tandem with the online portion, which she would review during our presentation in two months. I believe this was to help us keep track of notes in case we forgot to log them into the computer later, but it was used by me as a tool in my revenge.

The team came together…

I was paired with Pathological Liar and Sheep Boy, who I was kinda friends with. We brainstormed and settled on “testing the performance of an individual in exercise before and after they drink an energy drink”. This was in part influenced by Monster energy drink just becoming popular and Sheep Boy parents getting a new home gym. I thought it was great since I was playing football at the time and wanted to work out more.

Also, Pathological Liar, Sheep Boy, and I literally shared every class together and lived within a mile of each other so it would be super easy to communicate. However…, Sheep Boy and Pathological Liar never seemed to want to talk about the project. After two weeks of radio silence from Pathological Liar and Sheep Boy, I finally corralled them in one place and suggested we meet up at Sheep Boy’s house that weekend to start the project.

Here we go…

On the day of the meetup, Sheep Boy’s mom had to go grocery shopping or something so Sheep Boy was out. Undaunted I told Pathological Liar it’d be fine if we work at my house and researched other studies on it to get the ball rolling. But, Pathological Liar never showed up that day. So I decided to confront him on our walk home from school the next day.

Oh my Gawd if you heard what came out of this boy’s mouth as an excuse.

While we were literally within spitting distance of my house Pathological Liar said he couldn’t come over yesterday or today because his grandparents had gotten into a plane crash.

I was flabbergasted and exclaimed “What?! Really? But I didn’t see anything on the news about a plane crash.” Pathological Liar responded indignantly “Plane crashes happen all the time StartingtoSAV! They’re not all going to get reported on! Their plane struck another plane on the tarmac and then rolled over and snapped off both wings!”

Me: *insert surprised Pikachu face* “Omg I’m so sorry….. did they ***?”

PL: “What? No why would they ***, idiot?! Anyways I can’t do the project this week! See yeah…”

This wasn’t good…

This little turd then ran home. After I got home and deduced that he just fed me a sack of ****, I just said whatever and filed out the preliminary sections of the project and wrote notes in the composition book to at least ensure we had something to turn in next week. I was willing to give the group a second chance, cuz maybe their busy middle school lives were swamped.

After another two weeks of attempting to coordinate my group, and getting them to at least contribute a page or two to the report, we finally decided to meet up at Sheep Boy house again to start collecting the data. We actually all showed up this time and Sheep Boy’s mom had bought the Monster energy drinks we needed. Pathological Liar started to guzzle them because he wanted to test out the drinks first.

Sheep Boy showed off his new home gym and then got us to play Smash Bros for half an hour. I didn’t want to play at first but then decided to lighten up and we could do the tests afterward. After coaxing my group back to the gym Pathological Liar just rambled and chit-chatted. Me trying to be pragmatic said,” Hey guys why don’t we start our exercise now and record some data, and then afterward I can school y’all in Smash Bros?”.

Sheep Boy looked willing until Pathological Liar sighed out “Oh my Gawd StartingtoSAV *SIGHHHHHH* we didn’t invite you out to do this stupid project we invited you to hang out.” Sheep Boy’s attitude did a complete 180 chiming in “Yeah we don’t want to do the stupid project now!”

Now, they were angry…

I WAS SEETHING. Pathological Liar spouted a load of bull. This wasn’t even his house, I was the one who organized this get together to collect freakin’ science fair data! I was the one herding these sheeple around! OMG! The second chance I gave them was taken and then stomped all over the ground and they weren’t getting a third one. I relented and said, “Okay then let’s just hang out then.”

When I got home that night I was angry and I used that anger to fuel my revenge! I conscripted my parents to the science fair project and they helped me collect the data I needed by volunteering to work out and drink energy drinks, the data collection problem was solved.

Once I got enough data I wrote down everything for the science fair project in the composition book. I even uploaded everything to the online science fair board. I created all the PowerPoint slides and scripts for the presentation. Over the next few weeks leading up to the presentation, Sheep Boy and Pathological Liar didn’t even ask about the science fair project, they had no intention of doing any of the work.

Although my anger fueled me to get the project done I wasn’t finished. I did the pettiest thing I could think of and signed a corner of the Composition book with: “StartingToSAV did all the work!” I knew that Amazing Teacher would be checking our composition books while we were presenting the project and I couldn’t wait to see how Pathological Liar would try to weasel out of this one.

This was gonna be good!

On the day of the presentation, Pathological Liar and Sheep Boy were nervously fidgeting at their desks because they didn’t have anything prepared. I strolled in and told them to relax since I made a PowerPoint.

They relaxed not knowing how stupid they were going to look while presenting. OH, how dumb they looked when we started presenting to the whole class. I had already memorized the slides and my script and was effortlessly strolling around the room, making eye contact, and delivering a great speech on the science fair project.

Pathological Liar and Sheep Boy just read off the slides with deadpan expressions with their hands in their pants not moving an inch. I was relishing this, all the while gleefully peeking to the back of the classroom where Amazing Teacher was reading through our composition book. Amazing Teacher would stop our presentation ever once in a while to ask questions and compare with what was written down in the book.

But once the bomb dropped my blood ran cool with maniacal glee. I saw AT stop and read a corner of the book. She then read it out loud: “StartingToSAV did all the work!?”. I felt Pathological Liar and Sheep Boy grow cold next to me. PL, that cunning fox, stammered out “Well.. yeah he worked on that section, Miss.”

Amazing Teacher brought her glasses down to the tip of her nose and stared at Pathological Liar over the rims and cooly stated: “So you’re telling me that StartingToSAV was just signing his part of the composition book and that you all wrote in here equally?”

Pathological Liar: “Yes ma’am”

Me: *shrugs*

At this point I wavered, I didn’t want to feel the social wrath from them or their friends for stepping out and challenging Pathological Liar’s lie, so I stayed silent. At least I embarrassed them for a moment.

After my crowning achievement of embarrassing Pathological Liar and Sheep Boy, I thought nothing would really come from it, but boy was I wrong. After grades were released for the project I was totally bummed out that I got a 96%. It wasn’t the perfect A that I was hoping for and knew my mother would be asking me “Why didn’t you get an A+? Why didn’t you get a 100%?”

They got theirs…

But then Sheep Boy and Pathological Liar ran up to me with their eyes wide with terror asking: “What did you get for your grade?”

Me: “I got a grade.. Why?” (this is how my snarky *** avoided answering questions on my grade)

Pathological Liar: “Sheep Boy got a 66% and I got a 48%”

I was shocked to hear that, and then I figured out that Amazing Teacher must have interrogated my group mates on the project separately and awarded them the grades they deserved! OMG, my petty revenge tanked their grades!

The science fair project was alone 25% of our total grades that year. I was so grateful that Amazing Teacher saw my frustration and punished them!”

Let’s see how Reddit users reacted.

This Reddit user said this revenge was PRO.

Another person thought this was hilarious.

One individual doesn’t think this was a big deal.

Another reader disagreed with the previous commenter…

And one person shared their thoughts about this…

Nicely done!

Hats off to you!

If you thought that was an interesting story, check this one out about a man who created a points system for his inheritance, and a family friend ends up getting almost all of it.