July 14, 2010

• I Can’t Always Be A Nice Guy

  “Whoa, you know you did something wrong when you make Alex upset!”

  This was apparently a classmate’s response to my teammate when she told him about the day I got um, annoyed with our other teammate.  Now, contrary to popular belief I’m not always going to be pleasant.  I’m very understanding and empathetic yes, but even I can reach a breaking point.  Of course, it takes a lot to push me to that point.  What can you do?  For starters, being unreliable, flaky, disrespectful, extremely critical and judgmental of others, hypocritical, stubborn to a fault, and unreasonable are certain traits one can have that will test my patience.  Doing ALL of that, especially when those actions directly effect me and those around me?  Yeah, I’m not going to stay quiet for too long.

  Here’s a quick background of the girl that made me lose my cool.  There’s this girl (lets call her N) in my grad program.  She’s one of those sassy, loud, high maintenance, pretentious, highly opinionated girls that doesn’t have much of a word filter.  As a friend and fellow classmate I was fine with her personality.  In fact, often times she would make the time in class very entertaining just by being her outrageous self.  Despite all of those traits, I still felt like overall she had a good head on her shoulder.  Sure, she was a little ditzy and lacked common sense at times, but I knew she was more intelligent than she let on.

  Our grad program requires a lot of group projects.  Up until my recent summer course, I was never put into a group with N so I didn’t know how she was as a teammate.  However, I sure did hear an earful from those that have.  I just thought they were exaggerating how awful she was. 

  If anything, they understated how useless N can be.

  To put it bluntly, the whole team project with N was a pain.  She gave minimum effort doing her parts for the project.  Whenever anyone else needed help with something, she never volunteered whereas everyone else did.  At the same time, she expected us to support her when she was confused (which was a regular occurrence).  Whenever one of us would confront her about her not pulling her weight, she would get defensive and rudely dismiss us.  It was extremely hard getting her to come to meetings on time, and when she did she paid very little attention as her face was constantly buried in her laptop and phone.  That trend carried itself to class and during our presentations.

  The final straw was the day our professor went over all the things we needed to know and do to prepare for our final presentation.  While everyone else was fully concentrating and taking notes, I see N next to me Twittering away and downloading music.  When our professor was finished, he gave us the rest of the class time to work in our groups.  We had A LOT to go over and everyone that paid attention was really stressing out.  As we started to begin, I see N getting up and packing her stuff away.  When I asked her what she was doing, she tells me “I’m tired. I’m gonna go home.”

  …

  UGH!

  Oh, HELL nah!!  That ain’t gonna fly!!!

  So how did I respond to that?  To put it gently, I more or less told her to get her butt (I didn’t say “butt”, btw) back down so we can get our stuff (didn’t say “stuff” either) done.  When I looked around, my teammates all had hilariously surprised faces as if they witness a rare event.  N was (not surprisingly) visibly annoyed, but I didn’t care.  This final presentation was worth half our grade for the class, and I’ll be damned if I let her get away with pulling that crap. 

  Sometime shortly after this, I made the decision to write a grievance email to the professor about N.  I told him everything, recommending that she shouldn’t get the same grade as my team and saying that she was the major disappointment in an otherwise great class.  Looking back, I was pretty harsh, but that didn’t make it any less true.  I have to admit though, I was a little nervous about how my professor and my teammates would react to this.  Was I possibly overreacting?

  When I told them about what I wrote, I was pleasantly surprised to hear that they all felt the same exact way (some more so) and fully backed me up on calling N out.  They told me they were glad I didn’t let this slide, as she was completely hurting our team’s integrity.  My professor responded back with similar sentiments, saying he noticed her behavior as well and appreciated my courage to speak up for the team.  He told us that after reading my email, there’s no way she is going to get a high grade in the class.  That made us all feel a bit better .  The last thing he told us was not to worry about those type of people.  He seen a lot of people like that over his life and sooner or later they do get what’s coming to them.

  So yes, that was what I had to deal with in my summer course during the past 6 weeks.  Yesterday was our last day and it most certainly couldn’t have come sooner.  Going to try my best to avoid having her on my team ever again!

  • 10:47 pm
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