Okay, I’m so fucking pissed off right now it’s not even funny. I
happened to chat with someone in IRC (identity withheld for privacy
reasons) and she told me that she has heard a lot of bad things about
me. I seem to be a popular topic of discussion among the locals here
last time due to the fact that my father is the principal of one of the
biggest schools in town and God knows there was a lot of juicy gossip
going around when I came back from New Zealand during 1996/1997 to do
my Form 5. Happens a lot in small towns. I usually don’t mind, but this
particularly nasty rumor is so untrue and unlike my nature that I feel
compelled to write about it.
MPI = Methodist Pilley Institute (my ex-college)
Snippet of an edited (removed off topic stuff) IRC chat log with nick removed:
< > u study at mpi b4?
yeah i was in mpi before
you too?
<> mpi student complain about u
complain about wat?
< > u copy their assign
< > hehehehe
< > u realy nakal ho
eh
i didn’t copy
that girl gave it to me willingly
its different
:p
< > they say u smart in pc.. can hang in other pc.. then copy their assign..
okay now that is really not true
i never copied anyone’s assignment before
but a girl did give me her project
< > now i know the answer..
< > they lie..
but i know a lot of mpi ppl hate me
coz i easily pass the imis exam
but they had to take it a lot of times
< > luckily 2nite the god let us meet here… and u explain .. the true..
and i was quite arrogant, saying it was easy etc
so i know a lot of ppl dun like it
Here’s the thing that happened. (referring to the part where I said
the girl gave it to me willingly). There is an exam called IMIS which
has 6 modules and one of them is a project which is graded internally
(ie by MPI instead of the UK IMIS body). The project module only has 6
different types of questions. One of the 3rd year girls which I know
did the same one two years ago and she offered her past project. She
said it’s okay if I modified the code and passed me the diskette the
next day. I couldn’t make sense of the code and the girl spent a lot of
time helping me to modify it, including once on the day before it was
due where she had to drive to a cyber cafΓ© in Wisma Sanyan to finish
everything for me. I feel really bad about never getting to thank her
properly (what an asshole I am) but I don’t consider this cheating. I
wanted to buy her dinner at least, but she won’t hear of it, saying
that she’ll accept only when I pass, but by the time the results were
out, she has graduated. If you happen to read this, you know who you
are. THANK YOU! I mean it.
Now moving on to the cheating issue, I have never cheated or “copied
anyone’s assignment”. I don’t need to. I don’t mean to be an arrogant
fuck but EVERYONE was worse that me in my batch. I would have failed my
sorry ass if I were to copy their assignment (which I wouldn’t do for
moral reasons). I didn’t even care about the internal exams, ask any
lecturer who had taught me. I didn’t care about failing the internal
exams and didn’t do any work besides disrupting the class because all I
needed was the IMIS external exam to apply to Monash University. A lot
of people resent me because I passed everything with only one try with
Credits and Distinctions. On the other hand, a lot of the people in my
batch had problems with English and while they could rote memorize the
textbook, they just couldn’t express themselves and couldn’t answer
questions that even slightly deviated from textbook examples. I admit I
went around swinging my dick and talking about how easy the IMIS exams
were and how I got good grades without even studying (I actually only
studied the day before the exams) and it’s easy to see how people can
resent that considering they had to put in a lot of work plus they have
the language barrier to overcome.
I know I shouldn’t let it get under my hair like that, but I can’t help it.
People can say that:
1. I used to take drugs (but I’m NOT saying that I still do).
2. I got kicked out of high school in New Zealand for truancy and disciplinary issues.
3. I hung out with “congregations” of people who wouldn’t be considered model citizens in NZ and Kuching.
because those are true
People can’t say that:
I cheat
I’ll never do that, I’ll rather take a fail than cheat. The two times I’ve cheated on exams in my life was:
1. Changing the spelling of Paleolitic to Paleolithic in my Form 1
history test which the teacher asked us to correct ourselves by
exchanging it with the person beside us. I asked my neighbour to give
it back discretely and rubbed off the wrong spelling and corrected it.
The guy behind me (forgot whether it was Raymond or Xavier) immediately
said “hor cikgu, Huai Bin tukar jawapan” which translates to “teacher,
Huai Bin is changing his answer”. The teacher didn’t make a big deal
out of it, but I was so scared she would tell my parents. That was the
first day of our prefect duty and we needed to stand in front of the
other students during assembly. I can still remember a guy commenting
that I looked scared and he thought I had stage fright but it was
really because of the exam answer thing. I just couldn’t get it out of
my mind (no kidding) for several years. I would think about it and get
depressed and go outside and make myself fall down to scrape my knee to
get my mind off it. Oh, and I used to stuff my whole fist into my mouth
when I got anxious about the teacher telling my parents. It hurts
because you need to really open up your jaw to do that, but it gets
your mind off things. There was one time when I was with my father to
get some groceres and I met my Form 1 history teacher and I soooooo
wanted to get away I nearly cried and made up an excuse that I had a
really bad stomachache. Thinking back, it was stupid to get so anxious
and depressed over something like this, but my parental upbringing
tells me this is a Very Serious Offence TM and I was afraid of what my
parents would do when they found out.
2. This was in Form 3 and we had another History test. I had a crush
on this girl called Winnie and she didn’t study the 4 chapters that
would be in the exam today. So she made up a plan where she would study
one chapter, Sing Ling would study another, Raymond would study another
and myself would study another so effectively the four hive minds would
know every answer to the questions. I didn’t want to do it, but I was
infatuated with her at that time so I agreed. How did we cheat? We were
sitting together and we used a mixture of hand signals and feet tapping
and outright lip synching to communicate. π
I just got off the phone with a friend and she told me that being
angry about something like this is rather immature coz it’s not worth
getting your panties all in a twist over something you can’t control –
like what other people say. Perhaps that’s true. However I did spend a
lot of time typing this so I’m going to post it anyway. Thank you,
loyal reader, for reading this rant and have a nice day.
Oh, because of this rant, I haven’t finished the annual Sibu
Christmas parade write-up + pics that happened today. I’ll do that when
I when I wake up tomorrow. Damn those fuckwits for spreading those
rumors and taking up so much of my time to write this instead of the
parade write-up.
