You wonder at times how a person who has normal, or even higher than normal, intelligence can be such a klutz? Here you have what appears to be a reasonable, functional, adult human being, with at least a modicum of intelligence, who manages to stuff things up with sickening regularity.
Stella was one of these. She at university, doing a degree in Information Technology. She had a mind like a steel trap, instantly capturing everything that hit it. In her case I suppose I should say a mind like a lobster trap. The information goes in and stays there, and won't come out unless someone reached in and forcibly extracts it.
You assign her a problem and she won't know where to start. If given a hint she will start OK, and then go off on the wrong track. Oddly enough she was a favourite for group work. The other students quickly learned that she had all the knowledge and answers required for any project, and they used her as a sort of portable encyclopaedia.
The smart ones also wouldn't let her actually do any of the practical work on the project. If they did, she'd destroy it. Always with the best of intentions, but that didn't help students watching their project crash and burn.
She was taking one of my courses and I had the students doing a single project with the whole class involved. Including Stella. One of the braver students took me aside and quietly explained to me that I was insane to have Stella actively work on the practical side of the project. A few sample tasks proved their point.
A part of the project involved a survey. The class had to put together their own questionnaire for the survey and, to be honest, Stella starred. She came up with some damn good questions, and over half the final survey was based on her work. She also deleted the questionnaire from our computer, but I'm a great believer in backups.
Now the class distributed the questionnaires far and wide and we got back over a thousand replies. We had a room set aside for the class to work in, and as the questionnaires came in they got sorted into different piles, based on certain answers. Stella was under firm instructions not to touch the blasted things.
When the time for accepting replies was up we had five stacks of neatly sorted questionnaires. The next step would be analysing the results. I headed down to the room where the questionnaires were to leave the students some guidelines on how to handle the analysis. When I reached the room half the class was there, fuming.
I looked around and couldn't see anything noticeably wrong.
"Problem?" I asked.
"Why don't you explain, Stella," suggested one of women in an, oh so sweet and reasonable voice.
"It was an accident. I was just trying to be helpful." she said.
"I'm sure you were," I said. "Please, continue."
"I thought we should have backups of the questionnaires, so I just photocopied them is all."
I still failed to see the problem.
"And?"
"Well, I gathered up the stacks and took them to the photocopier and ran them through it."
"Ah, a moment, if you don't mind? You took each stack and photocopied them or you took them all at once and ran them all through together."
"Together," she admitted.
I shrugged.
"It shouldn't be too hard to split them into the individual stacks again," I suggested.
"True," murmured a voice, "if she hadn't dropped the whole damn lot, originals and photocopies, and then just scrabbled them all back into one pile."
It was one of those 'oh, shit' moments. The students would have to sit down and sort through a thousand replies and get them back into their original stacks. No, I was wrong. Two thousand replies, half of them duplicates. It was going to take them ages.
"Charley, just go to the database and reprint the replies," I said. "Then you won't need to worry about all the duplicates."
There were a few looks of relief at that. It would make things a lot easier even if it would still take hours to sort them all out. Still, many hands and all that jazz. As long as Stella's weren't two of them.
Before I turned and left them to it I turned and smiled at Stella.
"Ah, Stella, could you drop by and see me after your last class today? I'd like a word with you."
I then departed.
It was nearly five when Stella fronted at my office. For a while I thought that she'd decided to dodge the meeting, and I was the last person still in the offices. But she fronted up, tapping nervously on my door and edging through.
"It wasn't really my fault," she started.
"Oh?" I interrupted. "I thought it was. Ah, who actually dropped the questionnaires?"
"Well, it was me," she confessed, "but it was an accident. It could have happened to anyone."
"I see. Tell me, Stella, what instructions did I give you regarding the questionnaires?"
"Not to touch them for any reason," she admitted.
"I believe Charley gave you instructions regarding them as well. What were they?"
"Not to touch them," she said glumly.
"No, I'm sure it was more colloquial than that. Try again. I know you have an excellent memory."
"If I fucking touched them he'd break my bloody neck," she said, blushing.
"Mmm. Rather blunt, is our Charley. I see you still live. I wonder why."
"I think he's hoping you'll do the honours for him," Stella said softly, but I still caught it.
"So you deliberately disobeyed both my and the group leader's instructions and caused everyone a lot of work."
"I was only trying to create a backup so we wouldn't lose them," Stella protested.
"They were printouts. The originals are on the computer and backed up as well. I can recover them even if you do delete the originals. For some reason you just don't think things through. Why the hell don't you just put some forethought into what you do?"
I gave her a nasty look for a few moments while she wilted.
"The trouble now is that you're already on two warnings for stupid stuff-ups. If I have to give you a third it's automatically a fail for my class and you'll have to redo the course. God knows neither of us wants that to happen. Have you any suggestions?"
Stella wouldn't look at me. She knew that she was on her last warning and I could see she had something on her mind. Possibly something that explained her tardy arrival.
"You could always spank me," she muttered, so softly I barely heard it.
"Excuse me?"
"I said you could always spank me," she said, a lot more clearly. "I've read the rules. Corporal punishment is still on the books even if it's never used any more. So a spanking would mean that I'd be punished and I wouldn't have to repeat the course."
"You're not thinking things through again," I said quietly.
"Yes, I am," Stella protested. "I thought about this. All you have to do is deliver a spanking and mark it in my file as an agreed punishment. That's the end of it."
"No, it's not," I said. "Tell me, how do you see the spanking proceeding?"
"Ah, I suppose I'd have to bend over the desk and you'd spank me."
"Uh huh. Or perhaps over my knee?"
"I guess."
"You're wearing a short skirt," I pointed out. "That means that you'd be flashing your panties at me."
Stella blushed, and then I continued.