It annoys me when people haven't thought things through.

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I'm stressing out at the moment because my uni has decided that the hand in requirements must be needlessly complicated for my latest project. It's being handed in to three places for god's sake! A DVD, A hard drive, and a completely different hard drive.

Problem is the last one. It's in a particular room on campus. This room will only be available for hand in on deadline day.

I haven't handed in something on deadline day since first year. It allows no time for things to go horribly wrong. It's foolish. It's a schoolboy error. They've spent the last two years battering this into our heads. Deadline day is when you hand in if something went wrong, not when you plan to hand something in. Now they want me to take the risk of doing exactly that.

Off the top of my head, several things could go wrong;

Illness or injury on the day.
Technical malfunction.
Several people on the course will NOT be able to get in that day because a significant part of the rail line has slid into the ocean.
Theft of USB stick.
Misplacement of USB stick.
Power malfunction.
Sabotage (deletion of files)

This is why you never hand in on deadline day. But they haven't thought of this, they never do. I always have to drive myself mad focusing on the worst case scenario because I have to prepare for it because they have not.

It doesn't help that I have had a major deadline every week for the past three weeks now. I can't handle being this close to failure for this long. In deadline week, any number of things could go wrong that there would not be time to remedy. I can try to minimise this risk, but whereas handing in one or two days early is easy, handing in an entire week early is nigh on impossible, maybe even foolhardy. It could lead to rushing the work and getting a worse grade for it.

I can't handle this constant risk, this constant knowledge that I am only one string of unfortunate events away from being branded a failure for my misfortune. Why did they think it was a good idea to organise things this way? Why aren't any of my classmates freaking out as much? I know they're normal, but for god's sake, our entire lives are on the line week after week, how can anyone who supposedly cares about their work not be freaked out?

Hopefully, when this week is over, they'll back off for a little while. I can't stop working completely for too long, but I might at least have one week where something could go wrong without it being an instant game over.

I get that way, too. I think that's due to us on the spectrum being logical beings for the most part. That's why it drives us more crazy than it does most people.

Don't forget to keep backup copies of your work. Nothing says 'Oh Crap!" as much as 'Unable to read USB Drive D: - Would you like to format this drive Y/N'

I have the majority of my work in three different locations. THis is the sort of thing I think about, that they don't think about. They have no comprehension of luck, that random things can mess it up, and they're taking away my ability to prepare for those things. They're mad, all of them, either mad or stupid beyong belief!