![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Social Pariahs
Feb. 25th, 2004 12:00 pmI went to a meeting today where I heard some gossip about people around the campus where I work. I don't know most of the people. But one of the people I do know apparently is not well-liked or well-respected or something. "What? She's attending those meetings?" As if she is not good enough to be representing us or something. And yet I find her to be hard-working, good at the part of her job that I know about, and fun to talk to. She has a reputation among people I know as being bothersome, but that's because she is always looking for ways to make things work better. Which sometimes requires us to do more work.
This has happened before at work. That guy I greatly respected because he taught so many students at all levels and even from different schools and also did cool, important-sounding research? Turns out he's a sexist pig who treats women as inferiors and can't keep from looking at their bosoms. (Apparently my bosom is too small to attract attention.) That guy who seems so nice and does all kinds of interesting things like fly helicopters? Turns out he's a boring lecturer. The one professor who always writes neatly and clearly, so she never even needed any editing suggestions from me? Turns out she's hated in the classroom. The one who raves and raves about the one time he needed my typing skills? Asocial divorcee. Also, I had a professor who was pretty bad for one of my graduate classes but who won a teaching award for his undergraduate class.
So, I don't know what to think. Are my social perception skills nonexistent? Do I see the best in people to such an extreme that I can't see their bad sides? (That can't be it. Otherwise how can I hate that one landlady whose evil is so subtle that she thinks she's good?) Or probably it's just that people are good in some ways and bad in others and we all see them from different perspectives.
But here's another consideration. If I go around liking people who are disliked, disrespected, sexist piggish, boring, and asocial, what does that say about me? Am I to be avoided as well, by all those who notice this? Or am I a magnet for the socially inept? Or am I to be tapped as a liaison between the judgmental and the judged? That's actually one of my job duties, to act as a liaison between users and programmers. (Both are judgmental and judged.) I kind of like that role, but only because I like both the users and the programmers.
This all reminds me of a story I love, so now you have to listen to it. It concerns a friend of a friend who was working temp jobs. At one place she worked, she had for a boss a man who was well known for being difficult to work with. He was known to drive employees to tears. The turnover in his office was so fast, he didn't even know the temp's name. "Laura? Jane? Jennifer?" he would call. My friend-of-a-friend would not respond, because he did not call her name. He had to get up and talk to her at her desk. At one point he requested, "I hope there's not going to be a lot of crying around here." And she responded the way you usually have to fantasize in retrospect: "I can't promise there won't be any crying. But I can promise it won't be from me." Oh, yeah.
Thought of the day: My professor said Europeans used three basic strategies toward Native Americans while colonizing the Americas. I'd always lumped them into one category in my head: terrible. But maybe they were terrible because they were all colonizing in order to make more money. Still there were three different strategies, and although attributed to different European nationalities, they may have been based more on what they found than who they were.
One strategy was to cooperate with natives. This is theorized to have happened when the resources were more important than labor or land. This strategy is attributed to the French who, when they came to America, found their best chance for profits coming from fur trading, once they built a market for furs in England. Coercion would not have worked, I suspect because the natives rather than the Europeans were expert at producing furs.
One strategy was to interact with natives, but treating them as inferiors. This is theorized to have happened when labor was more important than land or other resources. This strategy was attributed to the Spaniards, who depended on slave or indentured labor for tasks such as gold mining. They also tapped into indigenous hierarchies to collect tribute.
One strategy was just to push natives away, theorized to happened when land was more important than labor or other resources. This strategy is attributed to the English. They focused on tobacco farming, which was hard on land, for their profits. They would set boundaries, defining "pales" beyond which all Native Americans must stay. Of course these boundaries moved further and further west until they reached the western coast. (The phrase "beyond the pale" comes from this word and means "outside this zone of exclusion.")
This has happened before at work. That guy I greatly respected because he taught so many students at all levels and even from different schools and also did cool, important-sounding research? Turns out he's a sexist pig who treats women as inferiors and can't keep from looking at their bosoms. (Apparently my bosom is too small to attract attention.) That guy who seems so nice and does all kinds of interesting things like fly helicopters? Turns out he's a boring lecturer. The one professor who always writes neatly and clearly, so she never even needed any editing suggestions from me? Turns out she's hated in the classroom. The one who raves and raves about the one time he needed my typing skills? Asocial divorcee. Also, I had a professor who was pretty bad for one of my graduate classes but who won a teaching award for his undergraduate class.
So, I don't know what to think. Are my social perception skills nonexistent? Do I see the best in people to such an extreme that I can't see their bad sides? (That can't be it. Otherwise how can I hate that one landlady whose evil is so subtle that she thinks she's good?) Or probably it's just that people are good in some ways and bad in others and we all see them from different perspectives.
But here's another consideration. If I go around liking people who are disliked, disrespected, sexist piggish, boring, and asocial, what does that say about me? Am I to be avoided as well, by all those who notice this? Or am I a magnet for the socially inept? Or am I to be tapped as a liaison between the judgmental and the judged? That's actually one of my job duties, to act as a liaison between users and programmers. (Both are judgmental and judged.) I kind of like that role, but only because I like both the users and the programmers.
This all reminds me of a story I love, so now you have to listen to it. It concerns a friend of a friend who was working temp jobs. At one place she worked, she had for a boss a man who was well known for being difficult to work with. He was known to drive employees to tears. The turnover in his office was so fast, he didn't even know the temp's name. "Laura? Jane? Jennifer?" he would call. My friend-of-a-friend would not respond, because he did not call her name. He had to get up and talk to her at her desk. At one point he requested, "I hope there's not going to be a lot of crying around here." And she responded the way you usually have to fantasize in retrospect: "I can't promise there won't be any crying. But I can promise it won't be from me." Oh, yeah.
Thought of the day: My professor said Europeans used three basic strategies toward Native Americans while colonizing the Americas. I'd always lumped them into one category in my head: terrible. But maybe they were terrible because they were all colonizing in order to make more money. Still there were three different strategies, and although attributed to different European nationalities, they may have been based more on what they found than who they were.
One strategy was to cooperate with natives. This is theorized to have happened when the resources were more important than labor or land. This strategy is attributed to the French who, when they came to America, found their best chance for profits coming from fur trading, once they built a market for furs in England. Coercion would not have worked, I suspect because the natives rather than the Europeans were expert at producing furs.
One strategy was to interact with natives, but treating them as inferiors. This is theorized to have happened when labor was more important than land or other resources. This strategy was attributed to the Spaniards, who depended on slave or indentured labor for tasks such as gold mining. They also tapped into indigenous hierarchies to collect tribute.
One strategy was just to push natives away, theorized to happened when land was more important than labor or other resources. This strategy is attributed to the English. They focused on tobacco farming, which was hard on land, for their profits. They would set boundaries, defining "pales" beyond which all Native Americans must stay. Of course these boundaries moved further and further west until they reached the western coast. (The phrase "beyond the pale" comes from this word and means "outside this zone of exclusion.")