Every type of meltdown you’ll have during exam season

It can’t get much worse than this


It’s that time of year again. The library all nighters have returned and a lack of sleep will teeter your patience to the very edge of a dread filled abyss. The smallest thing will make you snap and weep in despair, exaggerating every single teensy annoying thing that happens throughout your day.

So we decided to compile a list of meltdowns that you will almost definitely experience during this terrible time of year, and show that you’re not the only one. Just remember, it will all be over soon.

You’re running late for your exam and miss the bus

You see the end of the queue dissipate onto the bus and your lighthearted stroll quickly becomes a desperate sprint. You’re centimetres from the door and think “I’ve made it” only for it to close before your very eyes. Your heart sinks and your breath catches in your raspy throat. To make matters worse, you actually get a moment of eye contact with the driver as they smirk at you. I mean what do they gain from this encounter other than a malicious sense of superiority? As the bus swerves away you’re left deserted only to find everyone looking at your reddened face, feeling like an utter fool.

Eduroam stops working

You’ve finally got into a writing flow and have found a useful critic online, when a message suddenly comes up saying your laptop has disconnected from its network. You look in despair at the flickering wifi symbol, knowing that any attempts to make it load are futile. By now the essay no longer has your full attention, you’ve been caught off guard by this irritating distraction. You start to feel the beginnings of a writing block forming as your brain also struggles to load any decent ideas or information. You try to find some inspiration from the coffee or vending machine, only to discover it is out of order. The day officially reaches its moot point.

The sun begins to rise

Whilst experiencing the horrors of pulling an all nighter in the library, you look out the window to see a dark blue sky. As the hours pass, the birds start to chirp and the sky turns a pinkish colour. This doesn’t feel natural, you still have 1000 words of your essay left. Surely it can’t be sunrise yet?

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Getting a hangover

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that everything is ten times more likely to push you over the edge when you’ve been drinking heavily the night before. The alcohol drains from your cells and it feels like life itself is withdrawing from your system. How anyone can even remotely smile before noon baffles you, and God help any of your housemates that actually try to engage you in conversation. As you finally crawl from your bed following a night at the union, your mouth dry and rubbery and gasping for liquid, you realise it isn’t actually Sunday despite your dismal state. It’s a Tuesday, and you’ve got four hours worth of seminars this afternoon. It’s already 3pm, and you’ve missed the first one entirely.

Last minute referencing

You’ve just finished writing your last essay and you’re feeling pretty good. The hard part’s over. All that’s left is the referencing and that’s always easy; it doesn’t take much thought to just copy the technique in the style guide. Wait a second. You swear you copy and pasted the website links into the footers as you went along, I mean how else can you find the sources for all of your quotes? Now the four hours you have left before the deadline suddenly seem like a much shorter period of time. Also, how could you completely forget about the line numbers for poems and plays? How on earth did you think this could be achievable within four hours? As you begin to weep, the impossibility of the task ahead of you starts to sink in.

The printer in the library is jammed

So you’ve somewhat miraculously done all the referencing and written your essays, but the printer isn’t working. It still has paper, perhaps it’s jammed? The best idea is probably to go over and ask the librarian, especially with your deadline being half an hour away. Oh no, here we go again. Why is the queue to their desk so long? You know what, sod it. You’ll just go use the one two floors above. After climbing the seemingly endless flights of stairs, you remember how your printer credit has run out. It takes a good five minutes to get your credit card out and top up the balance online then finally, you are ready to print. This is the moment you’ve been waiting for, when all your hard work is satisfyingly printed onto reems of paper and ready to go in your punched plastic sheet. The finished copy. Wait, why has it printed on both sides? The style guide said each page needed a separate sheet. You drag your feet back to the computer, feeling deflated to put it mildly, and give it one more attempt.

Forgetting your cover sheet

You reach the hand-in room and whack out your 3200 word essay, all ready to go in pristine condition, before realising that the front cover is missing. Your palms begin to sweat as the admin staff look at you in confusion, and you know what they’re about to say. It’s such an easy thing to forget because it seems so insignificant in comparison to your actual essay, yet you know that without it the marker will penalise you for presentation and formatting skills. It’s in these moments that you remember what the module convenor said about leaving some vital time ahead of hand-ins, as you rush back home to grab that one piece of paper which is so seemingly meaningless yet annoyingly compulsory.

Realising your housemate has accidentally taken your lunch

In a house of messy students, nothing stays in one person’s clutches for more than 24 hours at a time before someone else needs it, uses it, or takes it. This can be anything from portable speakers to the pump for the blow-up mattress. It’s something you’ve learnt to accept. But now it’s exam season, you’re desperately trying to leave for campus before the library fills up, and you can’t find a single tupperware to put your sandwich in. You would just buy lunch on campus, but you’re already teetering dangerously on the edge of your overdraft limit. You’ve been scouring the kitchen now for 20 minutes – every drawer, cupboard, even the fridge – to no avail. You realise every computer in the library will have already gone as you grab your bag and head for the door, huffy, hot, and laden with textbooks. If only someone had bought some fucking cling-film. Your mood spirals lower and lower as you walk to campus.

When you didn’t reserve a space at the library

By the time you arrive at the library you’re sullen and pissed off and spiralling into deeper and deeper despair. As you suspected, there are absolutely no free computers. You circle each floor as you contemplate how each minute you spend looking for a space is a minute stolen from your revision, and your consequent future prospects. You stop actually paying attention to the desks you’re searching as you realise that the library is actually a metaphor for your life. You’re searching, aimlessly, but there are no vacancies.

When you’ve been waiting all week for a parcel and the delivery guy comes when nobody is in

You’ve been waiting for this Asos order all week. You successfully managed to keep it under £100 (well done you, that’s an achievement in itself) and you’ve spent every waking moment dreaming of what your late-night bargain hunting has yielded. You’ve got a really good feeling about this order; you didn’t go overboard, you actually remembered to apply your student discount, and you’re sure, for once, that everything might actually fit right.

As you walk home from a long day at uni, a spring in your step as you received that fateful text from Hermes this morning, you cannot wait to tear into that black and white plastic parcel. You approach the door and tug the handle but it’s locked. That’s funny, you thought Sam and Amy said they were going to be at home all day. As you reach for your keys the lead weight of the situation hits you. Where are they? Why didn’t they say they weren’t going to be in? Who collected my parcel? You see that smug, snarky, and slightly rude little note sitting on the mat. “We’re sorry we missed you”.