Kitty Litter
Monday, May 16, 2005
Beneath You?
Some time ago, I was at the department office joking around with the staff. We were discussing the antics of a crazy person who walked in and started threatening the staff, the faculty, and the students present. Ate Sanie, our computer person, began telling a hilarious story about how, several years ago, one of the toughest members of our faculty asked Sanie to accompany her for days after facing down the psycho. Seems the said psycho had plagiarized several papers in the tough faculty member’s class, and in several other classes, for that matter, in different colleges. When confronted with evidence of the misdeed, the psycho threatened to, shall we say, rearrange Tough Faculty’s face with a noxious liquid, in the spirit of the popular films of the time.
I was laughing my head off as Ate Sanie is quite a raconteur, and was embellishing the story with imitations of the faces the psycho and Tough Faculty made during the fight.
That’s when an older faculty member (not necessarily from our department) came in and glared balefully at us. We shut up promptly, and went on with our business. But on my way out, the older faculty member turned to me and said, “You should stop associating with the staff. It is beneath you. Desist.” Then the older faculty member floated imperiously away.
I know the older faculty member has reason to be ticked off at the staff. I know that person is of the “old school” and has a more rigid system of values than I do. But I felt that was out of line.
Our staff can be bribed to help us out of sticky situations which would otherwise require miles of bureaucratic tape to untangle. They field calls for us, and fend off wandering salespeople, pesky “Please pass me even if I never went to class” students, and the occasional weirdo. We do our jobs, and they do theirs. I like them because of and in spite of their quirks (one, Ate Jules, is feared by students because she is of the belief that all students are stupid and treats them accordingly).
Our staff can screw up royally, and occasionally, the screwups have harmed me. But don’t we all screw up? They are people too, and just because they’re ranked lower than me doesn’t mean anything when it comes to relating to them as people. I like a good laugh, and I don’t really care who makes me laugh. Even if that person is, in the eyes of some other people, beneath me.
They say the Nazis are hiding in the forests of South America. They’re wrong; the Nazi spirit of bigotry has traveled around the world and is alive and well in varying degrees in all of us.
I was laughing my head off as Ate Sanie is quite a raconteur, and was embellishing the story with imitations of the faces the psycho and Tough Faculty made during the fight.
That’s when an older faculty member (not necessarily from our department) came in and glared balefully at us. We shut up promptly, and went on with our business. But on my way out, the older faculty member turned to me and said, “You should stop associating with the staff. It is beneath you. Desist.” Then the older faculty member floated imperiously away.
I know the older faculty member has reason to be ticked off at the staff. I know that person is of the “old school” and has a more rigid system of values than I do. But I felt that was out of line.
Our staff can be bribed to help us out of sticky situations which would otherwise require miles of bureaucratic tape to untangle. They field calls for us, and fend off wandering salespeople, pesky “Please pass me even if I never went to class” students, and the occasional weirdo. We do our jobs, and they do theirs. I like them because of and in spite of their quirks (one, Ate Jules, is feared by students because she is of the belief that all students are stupid and treats them accordingly).
Our staff can screw up royally, and occasionally, the screwups have harmed me. But don’t we all screw up? They are people too, and just because they’re ranked lower than me doesn’t mean anything when it comes to relating to them as people. I like a good laugh, and I don’t really care who makes me laugh. Even if that person is, in the eyes of some other people, beneath me.
They say the Nazis are hiding in the forests of South America. They’re wrong; the Nazi spirit of bigotry has traveled around the world and is alive and well in varying degrees in all of us.
posted by Kitty Litter at 7:05 AM
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