Group meetings frustrate me

I had a group meeting on this last Monday for my database programming class. I am in a group of 4 people and we had decided to meet up in a computer lab at 5:30 to get it done. We have to get this done this week since it is due next week and who wants to work the week of thanksgiving.

On to the story. I sent out a reminder email the day before the meeting to remind people. Come time for the meeting. I was at the location on time and two of the group members showed up 15 minutes late. I decided to call the person that was not there since we had several hours of work to do. I tried to call them only to get a message saying it was an invalid phone number. I also decided to try instant messaging them. He was not online though.

Half an hour in one group member tell me that he has to leave at 7:00 because he has another thing to do. He does not tell me what it is though. My theory is he just did not want to work anymore, though he could have been tell the truth. For the past couple of days I have been trying to figure out how to do this lab. I have been emailing my group saying what I have found out how to do and what we still need to do. No one responds. I sent out an email saying we need to meet again. I still did not even get a response to that email till this morning.

I think people do not respond to emails because they do want to have to do more work. They can just pretend like they never read them. I finally found the kid that did not show up to the lab on Monday today. He said he did not know we even had a meeting and had not gotten my emails. He said he was having email troubles. Then I had to fix his email so we could contact him. The only problem with his email was that he had it sorted by subject rather than date. His inbox still told him when he had new email, so he should have read my email.

In college people are extremely unreliable. We are meeting again tonight and I imagine that part way through the meeting someone will say that they have something else to go work on. Keep in mind everyone said they are free to work on the project tonight. This should have been done on Monday, but a person leaving early and another not showing up screwed me.
Moral is you cannot always count on getting done what you had planned with groups. You might have to adjust your schedule to work on something multiple times since you failed to get it done the first time. A lot of the time you also just get nothing done during the meetings.