Tracey did it...

So I'm doing it too:

Name Five Traits About Others That Drive You Crazy:

(just five?)

Okay, so here goes:

1. Ingratitude when someone's doing something you won't do, or more specifically, the tendency to complain about the way other people are doing something without lifting a finger to help out. I suspect that most people who do some form of volunteer work deal with this on a regular basis. And it drives me CRAZY. Youth group: "The kids are too noisy" (how would you know? You're never down here on Wednesday nights). "They left shoe-marks on the tiled floor; can you please ask them not to wear tennis shoes in the fellowship hall?" (Um...some of these kids may have but one pair of shoes to their names; I will NOT micromanage to that degree. Would you rather see smudges on the tiled floor or a clean, pristine, perfect floor that no one ever walks on, because no one comes to church?). "Can't you CONTROL them better?" (There are two adults with a dozen or more teenagers. I don't see anyone else coming down to help CONTROL them. I am not Wonder Woman; I have no bracelets of power.)

Also, garden-variety ingratitude gets my goat. The people who put a worker in a shop to a lot of trouble for something and don't thank them. The people who treat the people serving them like dirt. (And yes, I do think that's a sort of ingratitude). The people who, when they're served a free meal, complain that the portions aren't big enough or that they really don't like the brand of ranch dressing served.

I also consider rudeness to waiters and shop assistants and people at the post office and checker-outers to be a form of ingratitude.

2. Intellectual laziness. I'm not talking about the occasional "I'm really beat so I'm going to sit down and watch SpongeBob SquarePants instead of reading Hegel" attitude. I'm not even talking about the "I'd rather laugh at SpongeBob SquarePants than cry over Hegel, so I'm not going to read him because I don't have to" attitude. I'm talking about people who are lazy in their jobs or at school. For example, students who, when given a month to write a paper on the current status and biology of a well-known endangered species, they wait until the day before it's due and then consult Wikipedia and some hunting magazine and consider that good enough.

And my attitude is: if you hate what you're majoring in enough to put that minimal an effort on a paper - especially when the prof has specifically outlined what he or she wants and suggested suitable sources to look in, you should consider another career. College is training for the job you're going to do. It's practice. It's also a chance to form good habits of thinking and research. If you're unwilling to put in the effort in college, do you really want to spend the next 40 years doing something similar?

Also: it is not HARD to find good resources. We have a library. We have all kinds of online journal databases with good information. I've offered to help students find stuff if they come to my office hours. I regard all of that as leading the horse to water. If it chooses not to drink, it's not my problem any more.

I select the assignments I give in my majors' classes fairly carefully so as to reflect what people might be doing in a career in the field. So if you can't see that - or if it's not important to you to "practice" what you're going to be doing in your career, find some other career.

And no, I don't buy the "This is my last four years to play!" attitude. You've had almost 20 years to play. Grow up and recognize that there's more to life than "play." Like, for example, the satisfaction of doing something well.

And besides - if you're doing it right, your career should feel like play at least some of the time.

3. People who take every random thing that happens as evidence that the world's out to get them and to thwart their happiness. People like this EXHAUST me. One thing I've learned is that 90% of the time when stupid random crap happens - like there's some directive from a micromanaging administrator which is going to turn out to make us do extra work - it is not because they want us to be unhappy, or they're punishing us, or something - it's just that someone made a stupid decision somewhere. Sometimes campus administrators don't have enough occupying their time and they think everyone is equally free, and so it should be no effort at all to, I don't know, ask us to move our offices so we are all in alphabetical order along the hall or something. There's this disconnect from what people who are actually "in the trenches" are doing every day, and sometimes that leads to things that look like they're being sent down to punish us. There's a great old saying: "Never attribute to malice what stupidity can explain." I use that one a lot. Because sometimes you just have to look at one of those "WTF were they thinking?" directives, and kind of shrug and grit your teeth and comply with it, but accept that it is not directed at you.

4. People who think they are the Most Important Person in the world. This includes the folks who have loud cell phone conversations in otherwise quiet restaurants, people who park straddling two parking places because they don't want their shiny new car to get dinged, people who park in the fire lane because they're "just going to be in the store a minute," people who decide they want to go on vacation so they call their professors up and tell them they have to offer them make-up exams because they're going to be off skiing or something during the scheduled exam. And also the people who think it's perfectly OK to drive their boom cars through the neighborhood at 1 am, waking up every person who actually has a responsible, taxpaying-type job.

The world's a big place and it has a lot of people in it. Things don't work if everyone expects that they always get their way 100% and that other people's desires or even rights don't matter.

5. Needy people. This is probably because I recognize "needy" tendencies in myself, but I tend to squash them down pretty hard, because I know how unattractive that trait is. But I have a really hard time with the student who 'adopts' me as her personal counselor (sorry, dear, but I'm not qualified and it's actually illegal for me to be offering advice on your personal problems). People who need to share all of their pain with everyone else around them - effectively turning the other people into their own personal trouble trees.

There comes a point where so many people are sharing their pain with me that I cannot bear it any more. I walk out of my door in the morning and all I can see are couples that have separated, children estranged from their parents, young adults who have hooked up with characters that aren't good for them, people in trouble with the law, and on, and on. And it makes me want to step back in my house, lock the door, and go and hide in my sewing room for a couple of weeks.

It also may be - and I realize this says something not very attractive about me - that I look at these people who are going around with this seemingly constant need for others to listen to them, to approve of them, to give them comfort, and I go, "No one cares about MY problems so I don't share them [well, except here on the blog, and you're reading this because you choose to]. No one is feeding me constant approval, no one is serving as my Linus Blanket. I'm making it all on my own and I am really no tougher than you. Either "man up" or find someone to give me the good stuff you're getting." Yes, it's a little jealousy. Jealousy because I come home at the end of the day, and if I've had a crap day, I just kind of have to shake it off and prepare for tomorrow - I don't have anyone (well, anyone in the sense of a physically present person) who can pat my head and go "poor sweet baby" and try to make me feel better.

And you know? Sometimes I kind of resent that. So I get frustrated by people who go around looking for random semi-strangers to pat them on the head and go "poor sweet baby."