A Personality Clash

Hello, fellow bloggers and readers! I know it probably looked like I slipped into oblivion sometime in mid-May and only surfaced a couple of times since. Well, that's pretty much what happened. Much like last summer, I thought I would have more time for blogging when I wasn't in class, but instead, my life falls apart with a lack of structure. Who knew?

Anyway, today's tale is a fun little story from working at the Undergraduate Writing Center at UT. I loved that job, and was heartbroken at the end of the semester when I had to stop working there. Three mornings a week last semester, I worked the front desk, so I checked people in, assigned them a consultant, handled the occasional grievance, answered the phone, and other front desk-y things. I never did this alone, of course; two people work the desk at the same time, and two days a week my desk partner was a nice young man who, in a stroke of originality, I'm going to call Nice Young Man.

Nice Young Man is very reserved and pretty quiet, and I think I probably made him crazy with my incessant yapping all semester long. I can't blame him if he was glad to be rid of me after having to be the silent side of a one-sided conversation for three hours twice a week. But, part of his being really reserved is that he doesn't like confrontation (who does??), so whenever our job required being mean, he would ask me to do it.

Angry Su. This isn't quite how I glare
at my coworkers, but it's close.

Student talking on their cell phone in the waiting area? I asked them to step outside. Someone angry about being kept waiting? I spoke the soothing(-ish) words. Consultant taking too long after being assigned a consultation? I went to the break room to light the fire under them. I didn't mind doing these things; in fact, I thought it was really sweet that Nice Young Man was so hesitant to order people around. The side effect, though, was that by the end of the semester, some of our coworkers had begun asking why I was less nice than at the beginning of the year. (Of course, not splitting the "Get to work!" duties with Nice Young Man was only half of it. The other half was that some of our coworkers got progressively more whiny and resistant to work as time went on, and I wasn't having any.)

So, there you have it. Nice Young Man managed to turn Talkative Su into Bossy Su, although to be fair, I didn't have that far to go.

Do you ever get to be bossy? Is it entertaining for you? Or are you the nice one who sits quietly and lets the other people do the bossing?