You Don't Get a Trophy

Before I was a lowly postdoc, I actually did interact with students.  You know,  teaching them and shit.  I'd come home and complain to my significant other about the things my students were doing.  SO is not in academia.  SO has a 'real job' and gets paid a 'real salary'.  SO has a B.A. and some other useful degrees and manages a large number of employees at a small business.  Most of these employees are the age of your typical undergraduate and hold 2 year degrees which trained them in the specific procedures that are used in that particular business, but nothing else. To put it in context, SO made a joke once about Sisyphus once and no one got it, nor another joke about Dante's Inferno.  I pointed out that these things are probably not included in the course sequence.

In SO's quest to become an excellent manager, SO has ordered many books on management, dealing with incompetence, motivating disinterested employes, etc. One day, the book Not Everyone Gets a Trophy: How to Manage Generation Y arrived at the door. It was an entertaining read.  We started to talk about it, and soon realized that my students and SOs employees were one and the same.  The behaviors I was seeing in the classroom translated directly to behaviors SO was seeing in the workplace.

So, let's play a game.  Guess which of the stories below involve my former students and which below involve one of SOs employees.

• "Jessica" - Was simply unable to perform her tasks today.  She's 'going through a difficult period in her life' right now, and went out with her girlfriends last night (a weeknight).  She said something about drinking Red Bull and vodka until 2AM.  She's hungover, sullen, and doesn't want to be there. 

• "Sarah" - Keeps texting her BFFs, even though she was told to put her goddamn phone away. 

• "Fred" - No one knows what Fred was up to last night, but he's not here for the time when we all gather together and learn useful information.  Fred sends an email later that he slept through his alarm, although you believed that 10AM was a reasonable time to be awake and present.

• "Tanya" - Needs constant affirmation for even the smallest tasks.  If no praise is immediately forthcoming, she pouts for lengthy amounts of time. It's hard to conjure up praise though, because the work is so mediocre. 

If you guessed these individuals were all my former students, you win!  However, if you guessed these individuals were all employees, you also win!  Congratulations, you've won! Trophies for everyone!