Organized chaos

Three times a week, I see students at 8:45 a.m. sprinting across the quad. Why? To get to their 8:45 class, of course. There was no catastrophe that led to a time change (though there were a few f-bombs exploding); the student knew all along that the class was going to start exactly at 8:45. This begs the question: Why do students continually neglect the theory of linear time flow and thus throw punctuality out the window? The answer: organized chaos.

The reasoning behind organized chaos can be traced back to the prior 20 minutes. At 8:25, the student looks at his alarm clock and says “It only takes 10 minutes to walk to class, I can continue my teenage dream for a little longer.” At 8:35, he gets up, brushes his teeth, puts clothes on (in that order) and then realizes that he needs to run to class. His mistake was failing to realize that it takes eight minutes to get ready. He needed to get up at 8:25 to actually make it on time. It was his own lack of attention to detail that resulted in a miscalculation of “the last possible minute,” not the fault of anyone else.

It should come as no surprise that organized chaos is wholly unsustainable in any other real-world capacity. If someone were to stand in line for 10 minutes at a McDonald’s and then only bother to glance at the menu when getting to the register, angry glances would be cast and angry punches might be thrown. In the office, if an employee is six minutes late to work, then a formal warning is issued. College is unique. The last minute system works only because most people abide by it. However, as my quad-crossing friend learned the hard way, planning is critical for those people who don’t abide by it (i.e., professors). It could even be rationalized that the “last minute strategy” is OK, just as long as careful planning goes into it.

My jogging friend had an unfortunate encounter with the notion that Duke students are bad planners. How many 5-hour Energies/Red Bulls/Minotaurs have been consumed less than 48 hours before the exam to make up for lost time? How many times has a term paper been turned in the day after LDOC because the author was too drunk? How many time has a student, five minutes before an exam, come down with an STI? It seems silly to even consider the notion that the top 1 percent of the world’s young minds could put themselves in these situations, but the reality is that it is happens constantly due to lack of some sort of detail, like the effects of alcohol on ability to write coherent sentences.

In the real world, missing these details can be even more catastrophic than college life. Karen Owen didn’t plan on the fact that humans, especially Homo sapiens feminines, are completely unable to keep gossip to themselves. Sig Nu and Alpha Delta Phi should not have added feminists to their social listservs. Anil Potti didn’t plan on anyone in the research field to research his background. These offenders overlooked what, to them, seemed like mundane details, but in the end, turned out to be an extremely important.

Given enough time these minutiae can be identified by a simple quality check. Professors always preach editing papers, so why not have a quality check for your plans? My roadrunner friend could have packed his notes in his bag the night before, popped some Listerine packs in there, too and slept in his clothes to eliminate the time it took to get dressed. That would have easily afforded him the extra 10 minutes he so desired. Though, I do question why this was the sixth time this semester he has done this. As George W. Bush once said, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me ... you can’t get fooled again.”

Just think, usually much more planning goes into a bigger event that a student group puts on than is seen. Take, for example, the pledge task that re-enacted the video “Call on Me” on the plaza last Friday at 2 p.m. The timing wasn’t coincidental; that is a very popular time to be chillaxing, relaxing and acting all cool. It wasn’t coincidental that the new members were wearing tight, feminine workout outfits that day, that they were synchronized in all of their moves or that speakers were setup. The dance number may have looked chaotic, but the details were most likely organized weeks in advance.

Sadly, the example horse hath been beaten to death. Every time something needs to get done, it should be carefully planned and calculated. Go ahead and apply it to your collegiate social life. Plan to meet your date at The Loop “sometime for dinner.” Years later, you will have to listen to your wife complain about how you were late to your first date.