Welcome Folks, This is Earth School ~Part One

There were some lessons learned this week... mostly about the person that I am and the person that I want to be. So here it is in a nutshell: Teamwork, people not coming through, challenges, perseverance, and in the end… fulfillment. Challenges were met and it felt great! Oh, and there was a bit of revenge but I will leave that for later.

This big epiphany came this week when I had an assignment that I had to work on with a partner. I will admit I am a bit of a control freak, but I think I work well with other people when I am controlling them. But the point is to get the job done, right?Well, it wasn’t just as easy as that. My partner, lets call her Mia, for 'Missing in Action.' Mia didn’t show up for any part of the project, she was unavailable for meetings, for taping, she neglected to contact the interviewees, I mean come on... what's an interview without people?

For three weeks, I worked diligently on this project. I put in many hours trying to set up interviews and then taping. And for each segment, Mia had some reason or another as to why she was unavailable. I literally could have written one of those mini-books that you buy at Walgreen's with all of many reasons she had for not showing up. The bottom line was that I had a job to do, and I was going to get it done.

About a week into my feeding frenzy and several unanswered emails and phone calls, I finally got an email from her the morning of the deadline saying, I wont be here this morning... I have a doctor's appointment but I am pretty good with the software (knowing I am not..) so we can just bang it out when I get there. (an hour before deadline!) My frustration wasn’t all Mia's fault though. I had just been transferred to work with Mia because my last partner did the very same thing for the past 6 weeks. So she was kind of paying for the sins of the father, Mio.

So when Mia emailed me on deadline day now ready to work on the assignment, it wasn’t so much what she said that pissed me off, but how she said it. She was like 'all nice,’ completely clueless as to there ever having been an issue... like everything was hunky dory... hey... how is everything going? This is Mia. I have a doctor's appointment but I will be there when I am ready to show up and save the day. But it's ok, we will just do this, and of course, I will take half the credit.. Are you serious? Three weeks worth of work and you are going to walk in and take half of the credit for this assignment? I don’t think so. To me, that was beyond my scope of respect which of course meant that Mia was about to experience a 'Come to Jesus" moment.

I wrote her an email back telling her that, "out of my stress, and your inconsideration, I spent the past three days straight working on this assignment simply because it needed to be done and when I didn’t hear from you .. I did it myself. Well I hadn’t really finished it but it was close and my bitchy side really didn’t want her to waltz in and get credit for all of my blood, sweat, and tears. I got a little help from my friends and learned enough to be dangerous and much like my sex life, I faked it until I made it and I got the interview done! YEA ME!

So back to the email.. still reeling from emotion from Mia's inconsideration and incredible ego, and for making the mistake of underestimating me... so I let her have it. She herself gave me all of the ammo I need to take her out as I pointed out all of the excuses, and the lack of her work contribution, failure to respond, and the lack of contacts she made, not to mention the audacity she had coming with her response that came in oh so, so casually ... like there was no issue. When I wrote her back, I cc'd the boss along with this statement... welcome to Earth school.

I get that life happens and people have issues, I do and I try to be compassionate, but at one point do you say HEY... enough is enough. I am not a doormat, and honestly, in some ways I felt the best thing I could do for her was to be honest. Maybe in some small way, she will take something from this. Had she at least communicated with me (something other then whining and excuses) things would have been different. I really am a big ‘ole softie. Take a poke at my hips as proof.

Then I started to think… and think… and think. Is this the person I really wanted to be? Not to say I want to be a doormat, but I realized that I didn’t have to be a bitch about this whole thing and I could have handled my response to her maybe a little bit differently because I did get something from this interaction as well.

In the hours that I had to put this project together and I learned more about the program. I was critiqued on my own, which again, showed me the mirror of some things that I needed to see on my own job skills. And most importantly, I hung in there and met the challenge. And even through the tears… I didn't give up. The exuberance I felt was worth it. Because in the end, I was truly proud of the fact that despite as many times I was frustrated, almost to the point of tears, I hung in there; and I did it, regardless, err in spite, of Mia.

Had I handled this any differently, I would have been condoning the doormat behavior, which isn’t me, and not at all empowering. And by the time I walked away from this project, I was proud of myself. Maybe I didn’t have to take Mia out, verbally that is.

So all in all, maybe this was a good thing... and we both got a lesson learned from Chapter 413 in the intricate study of human beings playing together here on Earth School...