honesty might not be the best policy

This happened to me a few weeks back. I know I call myself truevil and all but really, I almost always use the normal moral codes. After this particular incident, I was seriously considering honesty is not the best policy.

I'm at uni and my course requires practical classes. These classes usually last for 3 hours. My motto for prac classes is "let's get this bitch over with and get the hell out of here" and it serves me well. I usually finish the prac 1 hour early if I get a demonstrator who has the same motto for prac classes.

In my opinion, there are 2 types of demonstrators. The sympathetic deomonstrators and the not so sypathetic demonstrators. The sympathetic ones usually just tell us lazy bums student the answer and let us get the hell out of the lab so that he/she can get the hell out of the lab. The not so sympathetic ones just don't do that.

Not only did I have the not-so-sympathetic demonstrator that particular day, the lecture materials for the prac that we were supposed to be doing wouldn't be covered until the end of the semester. So I went there with basically a blank mind, which is usually the state of my mind every single prac anyway.

So I did my usual magic of finishing the practical part of the prac in one hour and wrote up the results in 3o minutes. By that time I thought I'd be out of there one hour and a half early. Man was I wrong. Not only did we get held back, we got an earful for not understanding the "mechanism of the reaction" which we hadn't and still haven't learned.

So where does honesty come in you might ask. Well, I confessed to the afforementioned demonstrator that I didn't know about that particular reaction and I got an earful about how I was supposed to be on top of all the materials regardless of when it would be covered, yada yada yada... If I didn't say anything about not knowing, I wouldn't have to listen to that particular lecture about being on top of everything and I would have gotten out of there a whole minute earlier with my pride intact. After I got out of there, I swore I would never be honest again.

However, when I come to think about it, it wasn't that bad really. True I got yelled at rather unjustly but then I was also at fault there for not whole heartedly prepare for the prac and for not shut my mouth when it counted. So the lessons to be learned here are:

• Be prepared
• Don't incriminate yourself if you don't have to
• Honesty might not always be the best policy. And
• Get thick-skinned sometimes so you don't upset yourself.

Needless to say, I've been putting these lessons to use ever since.