Pondering social dynamics
8 November 2009 08:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
3rdragonSpecifically, the screaming fight I had with one particular member of my math group.
First, a bit of background. When I was a small child, I was immensely good at getting and being angry. On one notable occasion, I stopped so hard on the floor that I dislodged smoke detectors on the ceiling below. On another, Viola and I had a big fight and I didn't talk to her for at least a week, perhaps two, despite the fact that she would've been ready to make up the next day (I suppose it's some sort of poetic justice that in the last (and only) fight we had in recent times, I was barely angry, but she wouldn't talk to me for two days.)
I'm not particularly proud of this. What I am proud of is the fact that I'm not that little girl anymore. It took a lot of time and effort, but I learned how to deal with my anger, and as an unexpected side effect, became rather more discriminating about what I became angry about.
Most of you have probably never seen me angry. I think only one of you has ever seen me really, properly angry.
I got really angry at groupmember D on Friday. The fact that I'm writing about it now shows that I haven't gotten over it.
Why haven't I gotten over it? Because I'm still angry at her.
I'm no longer angry at her for giving me her part of the paper so late that I had to scramble like crazy to proofread it and post it before the deadline. I'm still angry at her because, at no point in this process, has she acknowledged that I might possibly have legitimate reason to be annoyed, or that my frustration in this situation is understandable. In short, she has not acknowledged that everything I went through on Friday is anything other than a totally irrational response on my part. Which probably stems from the fact that she sees it that way.
Why was I mad at her in the first place?
I felt that she had broken her word; I understood her to be saying that she would send me her portion of the paper Thursday night, which I interpreted to mean before I woke up on Friday.
Additionally she claimed that the paper wouldn't need proofreading. It definitely did. Aside from a notable unprofessionalism in the style, and a distinct lack of periods at the ends of many of the sentences, there was a point in which the math was wrong; it we trade out numbers for variables, it said that |1+2|< |1|+|2|.
D's question: Why do I care? He probably wouldn't penalize if we missed a deadline, and we'll have a chance to correct errors in this draft of the paper.
Firstly, I had an obligation to the group: I will post the paper on Moodle by the deadline. By 'the paper,' I meant, 'the entire paper,' complete in all parts. (Although I was ready to throw up part 1 and what little bit of 2 I had, and looking back, if this were to happen again, that is what I would do, and e-mail her saying she could append her own part.) In my mind, this agreement with the group is a binding social contract, and either failing to do what I had said or changing the contract at the last minute by dumping all the work on D would be Bad Group Behavior, just as unpardonable as the behavior that got us into this whole business.
It would have looked unprofessional had I not scrambled to finish everything. Why do I care?
My mother is a professional woman, an actuary (technically was an actuary, nowadays she's more of a lapsed actuary working for PCUSA). She cut her eyeteeth in a world where you were judged by the neatness of your person and your office and the quality of the work that you did. And, I suspect, where you were judged just a little bit extra if you were a woman. As a result, my mother is a woman of Standards. She freely admits that her Standards are becoming somewhat passe; for example, blouse sticking out from underneath the jacket is rather the done thing these days, and my mother is well aware of this. Still, her Standards govern her behavior. And, to a lesser extent, they govern mine (I may not actually iron the wrinkles from my blouse when I take it out of the closet, but I will think, this should be ironed.) Those standards include things like, Turn your work in on time, whether or not it seems to actually matter. Don't hand in anything without proofreading it first - and it's preferable to have someone else proofread it, too. If there is a style for your paper, conform to it. Even if there isn't, keep your own style consistent.
All of which is to say that I was literally incapable of just sticking D's part onto the end of mine and posting the thing on Moodle.
And the way I tick is that running before a rising tide of deadlines makes me tense and stressed. I still perform well under such conditions, but I would perform happier without them.
Perhaps this is my mother's fault for loading me with all this stuff. But (and while my opinion may be biased), I think that most of them are useful things to have, especially if I wind up working anywhere with any sort of professional standard.
So that's the story of why I got mad at D, how I got madder at her, and why I'm still angry. It would be nice to be able to let this go, but all of my training requires forgiving her in order to do that, and I'm not there quite yet.
First, a bit of background. When I was a small child, I was immensely good at getting and being angry. On one notable occasion, I stopped so hard on the floor that I dislodged smoke detectors on the ceiling below. On another, Viola and I had a big fight and I didn't talk to her for at least a week, perhaps two, despite the fact that she would've been ready to make up the next day (I suppose it's some sort of poetic justice that in the last (and only) fight we had in recent times, I was barely angry, but she wouldn't talk to me for two days.)
I'm not particularly proud of this. What I am proud of is the fact that I'm not that little girl anymore. It took a lot of time and effort, but I learned how to deal with my anger, and as an unexpected side effect, became rather more discriminating about what I became angry about.
Most of you have probably never seen me angry. I think only one of you has ever seen me really, properly angry.
I got really angry at groupmember D on Friday. The fact that I'm writing about it now shows that I haven't gotten over it.
Why haven't I gotten over it? Because I'm still angry at her.
I'm no longer angry at her for giving me her part of the paper so late that I had to scramble like crazy to proofread it and post it before the deadline. I'm still angry at her because, at no point in this process, has she acknowledged that I might possibly have legitimate reason to be annoyed, or that my frustration in this situation is understandable. In short, she has not acknowledged that everything I went through on Friday is anything other than a totally irrational response on my part. Which probably stems from the fact that she sees it that way.
Why was I mad at her in the first place?
I felt that she had broken her word; I understood her to be saying that she would send me her portion of the paper Thursday night, which I interpreted to mean before I woke up on Friday.
Additionally she claimed that the paper wouldn't need proofreading. It definitely did. Aside from a notable unprofessionalism in the style, and a distinct lack of periods at the ends of many of the sentences, there was a point in which the math was wrong; it we trade out numbers for variables, it said that |1+2|< |1|+|2|.
D's question: Why do I care? He probably wouldn't penalize if we missed a deadline, and we'll have a chance to correct errors in this draft of the paper.
Firstly, I had an obligation to the group: I will post the paper on Moodle by the deadline. By 'the paper,' I meant, 'the entire paper,' complete in all parts. (Although I was ready to throw up part 1 and what little bit of 2 I had, and looking back, if this were to happen again, that is what I would do, and e-mail her saying she could append her own part.) In my mind, this agreement with the group is a binding social contract, and either failing to do what I had said or changing the contract at the last minute by dumping all the work on D would be Bad Group Behavior, just as unpardonable as the behavior that got us into this whole business.
It would have looked unprofessional had I not scrambled to finish everything. Why do I care?
My mother is a professional woman, an actuary (technically was an actuary, nowadays she's more of a lapsed actuary working for PCUSA). She cut her eyeteeth in a world where you were judged by the neatness of your person and your office and the quality of the work that you did. And, I suspect, where you were judged just a little bit extra if you were a woman. As a result, my mother is a woman of Standards. She freely admits that her Standards are becoming somewhat passe; for example, blouse sticking out from underneath the jacket is rather the done thing these days, and my mother is well aware of this. Still, her Standards govern her behavior. And, to a lesser extent, they govern mine (I may not actually iron the wrinkles from my blouse when I take it out of the closet, but I will think, this should be ironed.) Those standards include things like, Turn your work in on time, whether or not it seems to actually matter. Don't hand in anything without proofreading it first - and it's preferable to have someone else proofread it, too. If there is a style for your paper, conform to it. Even if there isn't, keep your own style consistent.
All of which is to say that I was literally incapable of just sticking D's part onto the end of mine and posting the thing on Moodle.
And the way I tick is that running before a rising tide of deadlines makes me tense and stressed. I still perform well under such conditions, but I would perform happier without them.
Perhaps this is my mother's fault for loading me with all this stuff. But (and while my opinion may be biased), I think that most of them are useful things to have, especially if I wind up working anywhere with any sort of professional standard.
So that's the story of why I got mad at D, how I got madder at her, and why I'm still angry. It would be nice to be able to let this go, but all of my training requires forgiving her in order to do that, and I'm not there quite yet.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 8 Nov 2009 11:48 pm (UTC)Here's a story for you:
***
There was one time I had a coworker ask me to help him launch an instrument suite we are not usually responsible for (except maybe to help handling the balloon), but he said he would cover. I was responsible for preparing one component of the instrument suite which I had used alone a number of times before (the component is prepared the same whether used alone or in this suite, by the way). He'd supposedly been trained, (but I learned halfway through the fiasco that he'd never actually had any hands-on experience, he'd only watched others do it.)
He managed to set my part of the instrument suite on fire(okay, well sparks and smoke but still), and came running to me to figure out what had gone wrong. The component was fine when I test ran it before hooking it into the suite. I asked him if he was absolutely sure he had wired everything together properly. Yep, he was sure. Was he ABSOLUTELY SURE (because it's not an easy setup)? Yep. He was sure. He was also sure that it had to have been my part that was wrong, because he had used a dummy part for mine for a previous test and things were working properly before he connected the real one. Now, the only way I could see there being the problem of the magnitude we'd seen was if there was a power feedback from something. I asked if he'd used the same battery configuration as before. Yep.
Okay, I removed the destroyed part (he'd cracked the circuit board through the silicon), and did some some field surgery to make a spare component work instead of the one I had prepared. I watched him put in the new component, and I asked him again if he was ABSOLUTELY certain of the way he was wiring it in. Yep, he was sure.
He managed to set that one sparking, too. We managed to save this second component from major damage, and at this point I'm trying to figure out how the instrument was configured on the spot (with no training whatsoever) because said coworker was destroying things and insisting he was doing everything right. It turned out a third person who had been around launches with this instrument suite was around, so we brought him in.
It turned out said coworker had managed to connect part of the suite backwards. Yep. EVERYTHING WAS EXACTLY THE SAME. HE WAS SURE.
I wanted to kill him.
****
Unfortunately, since you and I both have STANDARDS, we will always be the ones to be frustrated by others. We will also be pulling the extra weight. It sucks, but it's do that or not live by our own standards, and well, we both know what we're gonna pick, don't we? *sigh*
*Hugs* Sorry you had to deal with this.
no subject
Date: 9 Nov 2009 12:53 pm (UTC)