With our feet back on land and our fares paid to Charon, many engineers are finally done and can get out for a ton of fun in the sun. But as you wake up in a Monday haze, there’s a good chance that you might realize that the world around you has had the terrible bad manners of continuing to turn, and just because you ascended from Hades it does not mean that those lines are any less dead. What are you going to do? Where are you going to go? Who are you going to call? We’ll tell you whom: your friendly neighbourhood columnists! We’ve compiled for you a comprehensive guide to meeting deadlines at the last minute!
Butter-up the Boss
When you’re in a jam, butter is always the way to go. Appendage stuck in a bottle? Butter it up. Candybar stuck in plainsville? Butter it up! We picked up this technique from our dear and handsome friend, Jacob Terry, whom Waterloo region recently placed second in the “Most handsomest boy” beauty pageant and awarded him the prize of ten dollars! Every time they try to speak, just interrupt them with a deluge of compliments. This works exceptionally well because it also prevents them from expressing their own anger. Of course, it isn’t easy to come up with compliments all the time, so we recommend just pretending that you’re talking to someone you really respect and find handsome, like Mahatma Gandhi, Pierre Trudeau, Jared from the subway ads, MLK Jr., Nelson Mandela, or Jacob Terry, editor of the Iron Warrior. Some of the world’s smartest, most ambitious and handsomest men, like Jacob Terry, use this trick all the time. It’s like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in his famous book, “Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Haunted Cove”, “Complimentary, my dear Watson.”
Use Quotations
Some might claim that the excessive use of quotations or citations is a cheap ploy to fill space. Some might also say that some are just big jerks who suck and we hate them. Quotations are an important way to beef up your arguments and add credibility. Winston Churchill once said, “It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.” Now we know what you’re thinking. Whoa, whoa whoa! Am I reading the “Classy Gazette” or “Exquisite Times”? You’re not, but you might as well be. After all, as Hendrik Willem van Loon once said, “somewhere in the world there is an epigram for every dilemma.” It’s true, Mr. Willem van Loon, it’s very true. Your job, reader, is to simply embark on a mission to find that quotation and use it. If there is still any doubt in your mind, just recall the immortal words of Jacob Terry, “I’m a very handsome boy who’s not only handsome but also smart, but I’m still also handsome.”
Make Sure You Don’t Send a Corrupt File
Sometimes it totally happens that something was completely and submitted on time but then the file made like a youth exposed to Harry Potter and became irreparably corrupted! This legit happens on its own even though some people might be so crass as to make a Word doc with the expected size of one’s finished work, open it in notepad and delete some of the gibberish you’ll see making it corrupted and unopenable which some people might submit prior to deadline so that they can buy more time. Such people are turkeys of the lowest and scroundreliest order because when computers are being jerks and corrupting your files when they really were done on time, they make it look like they weren’t! If you find yourself in this predicament, you had better hope that the person to whom you’re submitting your assignment is kind and understanding and handsome.
Plagiarize
[This section has been redacted in accordance with uWaterloo Policy #71.]
Easy Topics
No matter what it is you’re working on, there are always easy fall-back topics. After work term reports, for example, it was not difficult to decide that our absolute favourite word was “optimize”. Or when writing an article on the top ways to do something, just give “ironically” crude advice about drugs, sex, and money. It isn’t our fault that these always find our way into our articles, they’re just the top ways to do near about anything!
Drugs
No, we aren’t talking about taking caffeine or Ritalin so that you turn into Bradley Cooper in Limitless or psychedelics to inspire your creativity. No, we’re talking about giving drugs to your boss so that you can pretend that they received your assignment on time, and simply forgot about it; if that doesn’t work, you can blackmail them with the pictures you took while they were in Wonderland.
Lie
When all else fails, you don’t have much of choice. Owning up to your mistakes is really dumb when you still may have a shot with getting away with a lie. We saw this happen while out on Friday and Saturday at the national Alibi convention gathering information to write an amazing set of articles for The Iron Warrior. Unfortunately, there was a huge hurricane and we lost all of our information and also had amnesia so we couldn’t recall it but it was only partial amnesia so we remembered this much about the convention.
And there you have it: a comprehensive guide which took us a very long time to write about something that is very relevant and not at all leaning heavily on the narcissistic notion that being meta is a crutch for the lazy to appear more thoughtful than they are. Unlike Jacob Terry, who actually is more insightful … and handsome.
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