Do you live out in the country? I lived in a rural area at one point and there are some people who just do not have two brain cells to scrape together, getting drunk and shooting at anything that moves is a pastime in some places, and the 0.22 is the favored weapon of such a person. Hope the dog makes it through.
I went to a high-tier college, so my absolute least favorite kind of person very quickly became the "strategic student". You know what I'm talking about, the person who will do absolutely anything to guarantee an A because they have gone and tied their sense of self-worth to their GPA. This is the person who will hoard library books so other people can't study, abuse adderall for all-nighters while simultaneously selling sleeping pills disguised as adderall to other students (I actually do have ADHD so this is another reason I especially hate these people), spread computer viruses around so that other people can't do their projects, fake study groups where they pretend to be helping their classmates but are actually teaching them incorrect information so that they'll get wrong answers on tests, sharing old exams, etc. Literally everything except picking a subject that they genuinely enjoy and can take personal pleasure in mastering.
The absolute worst I saw, and in one case personally experienced, was students who would break into the dorm rooms of students they knew to have learning disabilities to steal their medication. I've been prescribed Vyvanse since 2008 and adderall before that, because I genuinely need these meds to function, and on three separate occasions was the victim of break-in thefts where my pills were the only thing that went missing. I don't even know how they found out that I was prescribed them.
I think the most outlandish cheating scheme I ever heard of was a kid who went around tearing down all the posters that were put up by the health center for free flu shots, because he thought it would improve his chances of beating the class if other students got sick. He ended up being suspended for a semester after being reported by a group of students who were immune-compromised who had heard about it.
That's the other thing. This wasn't a place that recorded class rank and classes were almost always too small to put on a curve, so it wasn't like those places you hear about where the curve is so extreme that a 94% becomes a C. These aren't just regular asshole overachievers, they're the kind who not only have an unhealthy obsession with having the best grades but become bothered when they see other people doing as well as them. Getting an A in an honors-level course at one of the best universities in the world isn't enough for them, they have to be the only with an A to be happy.
Thankfully, vindication often comes to everyone else during junior or senior year, when job offers and grad school acceptances start coming back, and these guys realize two things: First, the attitude that you have to screw everyone rarely appeals to employers and second, more importantly, grades don't really matter that much in the real world. The students who got the best offers and admissions were students with good grades, research experience, internships, and recommendations. The pusher types rarely have all of these because they're concerned with grades only, not with actually using their education as the starting point to a career and certainly not with actually mastering the subject. In fact, most of them actually end up graduating with mediocre grades because the emphasis on getting A's with as little effort as possible tends to bite you in the ass come junior and senior year when you're expected to actually know your stuff.
Sadly, many of the students at good colleges are like this. They work hard because they're neurotic and want the good grades just for the sake of it, not because they genuinely care about what they're studying. And what makes me really hate them is that because of them students who truly just want to study what they love get forced to go on the defensive in order to keep up academically. They create a toxic environment that just ruins everything for everyone. I hope they die of a ritalin overdose.
In fact, sometimes they literally create a toxic environment. There are so many students at top colleges abusing stimulants that environmental scientists are able to detect dextroamphetamine and methylphenidate metabolites in significant quantities in waterways connected to those schools. One of the professors here who did a similar survey of the waterways near the college I went to went so far as to say that if you were to go swimming in some of those rivers on the weekend, you would fail a drug test at work on Monday. I'm fairly sure she was exaggerating, but I wouldn't doubt it if she told me she wasn't.
All right it's probably not that rare of a sentiment, but it's still an eerily similar set of thoughts.
