So I’ve just finished another course yesterday. One in eCommerce. I have to say I really enjoyed it up except until Thursday. Throughout the week we were in groups creating a prototype of an eCommerce site. I was in really good group who were making lots of progress. Infact we were ahead of pretty much all the other groups and what was best was that 3 guys in the group had never done any PHP, HTML, MySQL or Javascript programming! I was quite fortunate in that had used all of these for my third year project and one other girl had also done a bit. Anyway, we were making headway, we’d managed to split the work so that the guy who’d done a little database stuff could do his work, the girl who’d not really done much used a Web Page designer for our main layout and me and another guy, Matt, worked on our “proof of concept” (I will show it, I’m just rejigging it though).
So, on Thursday night, having been working all day in Uni til 7pm and almost finishing our proof of concept (i.e. make a prototype to prove it will work) I get home to find an email from one of the girls in our group. In the email she basically slagged off everyone’s work, with no tact or regards for the fact that some of them had never done any of this stuff before and decided she would go on a huge mission to write a lot of the project that night!!! She basically wanted to use all possible standards and ensure the site works for blind people and for people who don’t have a javascript enabled browser (which is about 1% of the world population). Now, I don’t have any problem making it accessible to blind people, however when you’ve been slaving over it for a week and you’ve ALL agreed you are gonna just do (as our American lecturer calls it) “a killer app” using some new technology to have someone send a selfish email like that left extremely pissed off!!! She showed no regard for anyone’s feeling except her own. She even said in the email that she’d told use she was colour blind on the first day. To be honest I all ever heard from all week was “My husband” this “My husband” that, “I’m vegetarian, and I’m lactose intolerant, I can’t eat anything”. It annoyed me that by the end of the week I knew pretty much her whole life story and nothing about any of the other guys cos no-one else could get a word in.
Then, to top it off on Friday, the day of our demo. I tested our page on a friends computer, after having made a few minor changes and found one bit didn’t show right, even though I’d tested it earlier. So I said I’d quickly take a look at it before we did our presentation in about 10minutes time. After I walked out, she turned to the other guys and said “He’d better not f**k it up, he’s been doing it all week”. I had to laugh when they told me cos it was her that was messing stuff up for everyone, making wild changes without telling anyone. As you can tell I’m not bitter, but I’m so annoyed that someone can be so selfish and controlling and have little regard for other people.
