Unreliable people make my life much harder than it needs to be. Here are four cases where unreliable people have impacted me in negative ways.

Currently I am taking Engineering Processes. In this class, we are divided into groups of two. We picked our groups the second week of class, and I joined with a guy who was not there the first week. That was my mistake, I admit it, but I figured it was just a one-time thing. The third week of class rolled around and he is nowhere to be found. I texted him asking where he was and got no response. The day of the fourth week’s class started and I texted him asking if he was going to show up. He, at this point, tells me that he dropped the class. I, not being the argumentative type, said “alright.” On the inside though, I was really upset that he didn’t have the decency to take the 30 seconds to text me that he dropped it.

With our technology these days where I can contact anybody from anywhere, there is no reason not to send a courtesy text or email explaining the situation. This goes for meetings, too. Case and point, The Polytechnic’s business meetings every Sunday. The majority of the time we have to call people who are late to remind them to show up. If you can’t show up, let us know! The last meeting started 14 minutes late due to having to call people to reach quorum.

Another issue is if you say you are going to do something, do it. In many cases I have had people in group projects just not do what they were assigned to do. This mainly happened during high school when I wasn’t going to get a bad grade. People knew this and would be really happy when they were put in my group. They knew that they could take advantage of me and wouldn’t have to do anything to receive an ‘A’. Of course my teachers wouldn’t do much about this, but that is another rant for another time.

It is not just in real life that I witness unreliability, I experience it online also. I play a game called Grepolis which relies on teamwork and communication. For the past year my alliance has been growing and preparing to win the world. We would have won it easily if everybody did their part, but there were people who didn’t. A person with the username Apt Pupil decided to ditch us without letting anybody know. The enemy took a major city in our heartland due to Apt’s inconsiderate hiatus. Now, what should have been a decisive victory will be a couple months of bloodshed to determine the winner. I woke up many times in the middle of the night to attack enemies or support my fellow alliance members, and it is infuriating that after all I have done for them, they just don’t care enough to let us know. I do my best, but I can’t carry the weight of three or four people not doing their part.

It pretty much all boils down to this: If you say you are going to do something, do it. If reasons come up as to why you can’t, let people know as soon as possible so they can work on fixing it, and try your hardest to not be late to regularly scheduled meetings that you know are going to happen every week.