Following the Rules

We always say that rules are made to be broken, but that isn't entirely true is it? Sometimes, it pays to follow the rules and I'm a living testimony of that.

Let me tell you a story.

_{Photo by Christopher Sardegna}

I had gone to school today to write my exam but it turned out that not everyone in my department had exams today. It was just my option (telecommunications option), so everyone else was to sit at home and relax while myself and some few others were sweating it out at the exam hall. When I was done, I had walked out of the hall only to see a lot of my course mates hanging around the exam hall.

It turned out that they had all carried over a course that we had written the previous year and today was the day they were to rewrite that course. I remember feeling a hit shocked by the number of carryover students I saw because I had no idea a lot of them had failed the course, but then I suddenly remembered that probably the only reason I wasn't among this guys right now was because of a miracle that happened when we first wrote that exam the previous year.

During the exam last year, the lecturer had given us two separate piece of papers, one had all of the questions in it while the other one was a building plan. On the building plan, the instruction was for us to wire it and also write out a load chart, basically engineering stuff.

Now when I saw that question, I knew it was going to take all of my time (reasons why the lecturer made it a compulsory question), so what I had done was that I had left that question and focused on others. For some strange reasons I had made up my mind on not answering that question and that after I'm done with the exam, I would go home and pray for a C or any mark at all that wouldn't require me rewriting that same exam.

_{Photo by Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu}

But you see, a miracle had happened like I said. While I was writing the answers that I knew, someone had sneaked into my seat, somehow escaping the supervision of the supervisors and he had done that so that he could copy the answers to the building plan from the guys sitting directly in front of me. I didn't say anything when this happened, we were about getting to the end of the exam and the whole place was tensed up because we all haven't written much so it wasn't a surprise to me that he was trying to move to a place with greener pastures.

Anyways, the examination time finally got exhausted and now the supervisors were pressuring us to submit our work, that was when I began looking for my building plans. I hadn't drawn anything on it but had written my name on it because we were instructed to do so and submit it with our answer sheet.

So I had searched for my building plan only to discover that the building plan that guy who had sneaked into my seat was drawing on for the past ten minutes wasn't his, it was mine. The moment I saw it and brought it to his attention, the optimistic looks he had in his eyes suddenly vanished, almost as if I had just informed him about the death of a loved one.

There was nothing we both could do as my name was already written on the building plan, so I ended up submitting the plan he had spent his time copying while he submitted an empty building plan. It was a sad experience for him, one he wouldn't have experienced if he had chosen to follow the rules and stayed at his seat, something I had done and got rewarded for it.