general Biggest waste of time you've ever put a lot of work into?

[That Guy with the CMB 5,873]

Whether it was a personal project that bombed or a school assignment that you got an F on, what was the biggest waste of time you've ever put a ton of work into and it just failed? Bonus, how mad were you about it?

 

 

I'm writing this because I wasted three-and-a-half hours doing something for school for an F...which isn't the biggest waste of time on a project I've experienced, but it's definitely up there. I actually strained my eyes staring at an off-brand Microsoft Word for three-and-a-half hours straight and typing my heart out, but it got an F because it didn't directly respond to what the teacher wanted. I felt as if the teacher were hiding a paper with the exact words he wanted on the research paper but he didn't tell me. It hurt my self-esteem, too, because I typically rock the house on essays.

[AtomicStone 724]

I wasted a whole 4 years of high school with a class full of trouble makers and teachers that couldn't control them which ultimately led to below average grades (D's and E's) I worked the hardest that I could under the circumstances but it got me nowhere.

Yeah, high school was pretty much one of the low points of my life.

Edited March 3, 2016 by AtomicStone

[Roughshod 719]

Every job I've ever had in my life.

[ARagY 1,152]

I'unno, learning Esperanto?

[That Guy with the CMB 5,873]

Every job I've ever had in my life.

That post and signature going hand and hand though

[Member Berry 1,217]

Psychology AS. I had an E. In my defence my gran passed away the same week as my exam.

[Envy 6,160]

I've worked four years at a job, only to now be making the same amount of money per hour as people who started this last December, due to a general raise... Which bumped me up, because I wasn't even making the amount that these new people are making right off the bat.

[Yamato 1,348]

Trying to get my life together.

Edited March 3, 2016 by Soarer

[Roughshod 719]

That post and signature going hand and hand though

Yeah well its not like this thread is a barrel of laughs.

[MangaKamen 146]

Pretty much every time I make an animation that doesn't have a guest star in it.

[Quinch 1,120]

Seven years of music school.

 

Does it count, though, if the work involved was something you didn't have a say in?

[Moon Sugar 532]

Biggest waste of time? The only one I can think of is currently my signature. It's my first GIF and it's supposed to Moon Sugar as an Equestria Girl walking and omg. Never again.

[GeekySonic 1,150]

I am in my second year in algebra after failing it. This year, I also failed geometry. I can't handle it because no matter how hard I try, I simply cannot understand it.

 

I dedicated every study period to math, stayed after school, went in early, stayed up at night trying to finish, and even saw a tutor. My grade in algebra is under 40% as of right now.

 

It infuriates me to no end. Especially since my teachers refuse to understand that I am trying to learn. I let all of my other grades drop a letter just to raise my algebra grade by a single percentage point.

 

If there was a summer school here, I would certainly go to it. But right now, I doubt I will graduate.

[PinkieatHeart 208]

I worked on a drawing for like, three hours once, and accidentally closed out of it without saving. I was crazy mad. Didn't come back to the drawing for at least three days.

 

But I got it to look even better, so it all worked out.

 

 

Also, I put too much effort into most phone apps, especially since I always end up getting bored and deleting them anyway. >.>'

[Thuja 3,659]

I think I'd have to say school, just in general.  The amount of times I had to repeat a class over again at a new school because my marks from the previous school weren't high enough.

[Troblems 5,617]

World of Warcraft, because nobody wins.

 

When I was in college, I had this awful professor who was racist and a male chauvinist. I showed up for every class of his, and was doing fairly well. I worked really hard in his class, reading every stupid reading assignment he gave us, yet still doing poorly on his quizzes because he asked about irrelevant details from the reading, and not the overarching theme. He assigned us a 10 page paper that I poured my heart and soul into, and I was damned proud of that paper. He picked it apart, and gave me a C minus. I took it to another English professor, and she said it was a fantastic paper than that I didn't deserve such a poor grade. Anyways, I wore that C minus like a badge of honor. Never been so proud of such a bad grade before.

 

This is why the tenure system is awful. Dude was an awful educator.

[Kiri 7,288]

Drawing something and the program crashes, and I find that somehow the file got damaged or I forgot to save my progress. Instant rage quit.

 

 

 

This is why the tenure system is awful. Dude was an awful educator.

Oh my gosh. Evil tenured professors are the worst. I had a similar situation when I was in college as well.

[EquestriaGuy 1,074]

I was just passed up on a promotion I was clearly the top candidate for BY LIGHT YEARS, because it was an opening on another shift, and the manager of that shift wanted his own guy. I've spent a hell of a lot of time and effort building myself up for this kind of promotion, all for it to be ignored entirely.

 

Needles to say I'm salty as fuck right now.

[KatonRyu 1,033]

My biggest waste of time was easily my first attempt at a graduation project. The company at which I was an intern had set up an assignment that met the demands of my college, yet when I started it turned out that nothing was planned for the project at all but some very vague guidelines, the contacts I was supposed to get in touch with were either unreachable or had no clue what the project was supposed to add to what they already had, and much farther down the line it turned out the application they wanted was essentially a clone of something they already had, meaning I would've failed regardless of whether or not I'd done anything. That stuff cost me five months and fucked over my work mentality so hard I screwed up my next assignment as well, so all in all I lost a full year to this.

 

Still, I'm doing well now so in the end I guess it was worth it...or it will be when I finish my third attempt at graduating in three weeks.

[Xylosian 140]

Projects in all subjects during high school, they literally taught me nothing about that certain topic the project was based around.

[Comic Sans 401]

* my own art. i always feel a sense of pride when i spend so much time working on something and then when i upload it for people to see, no one even gives a crap. makes me not even want to bother trying.

[Ziggy + Angel + Rain 11,302]

Right after high school, I managed to convince myself that taking a correspondence course in gunsmithing was a good idea.  It wasn't something that required constant effort, but it did take me something like a year (partly because of how the course was set up) to complete the thing and get my degree.  A degree which, I might add, I no longer have in my possession.

[Celtore 2,770]

In a way, studying journalism, but in many ways not. It taught me photography skills and better writing skills, but some of the courses were completely unnecessary.

 

Some examples, there was a course about software which "teaches" how to use MS Word, Excel and Powerpoint. The one class where he showed how to password protect excel spreadsheets, I showed my neighboring classmates how to break the lock with 7zip and notepad. To be fair though, I was probably one of the more tech savvy in that class and I usually finished early and could browse reddit for like half the class.

 

Similarly, there was another class called interpersonal group dynamics where the teacher sat in the back of the room and judged us on teaching the course content. I never showed up in the group meetings we were supposed to have, but I was the best presenter of the group so I got a free pass. But even then, the activities, games and even the lessons were all so bloody pointless and occasionally insulting. The best way to describe the course content is to compare it to those propaganda videos corporations sometimes show new employees, except it goes on for three hours every week for an entire semester.

[frecklesareblooming 225]

Standardized tests. In eighth grade, I failed my Math exam, and spent a few weeks in summer school mulling over notes until my brain died, and then I came home and did countless worksheets to improve, which I was. Test day came and I failed it. It was heartbreaking for me back then, but fortunately I graduated anyway and moved onto high school. Still, that was probably the most studying I've ever done and it makes me cringe to think about it.

[Windseeker 546]

The technical algebra class I had during the freshman year of my college.

 

I struggled with math since seventh grade, I suck at it, pure and freaking simple. Never able to do better. However in college, I was hell-bent determined to become a software developer and I studied left and right, took me hours upon hours to do the algebra assignments, I took online tutors and solved equations from the patterns I observed in the examples. At the end of the semester I accumulated a B+ grade, but I failed the finals by one point and thus failed the class overall.

 

A damn waste of my time, thankfully my idiotic stubbornness kept me from dropping out.