Right Wing Nation

Universities are hotbeds of wackjobs. Worse, people with PhDs tend to be surprisingly fragile (surprising, since if a PhD is a test of anything, it’s tenacity and the ability to deal with stress) and highly neurotic, with inflated senses of self-importance. People with PhDs also tend to be drama queens. Everything is traumatic. Rarely will they just shrug, suck it up, and move on, not when they can throw a major fit and stomp out. Put several hundred or more of these fragile-ego prima donnas together in a work environment, and you get insanity. People with PhDs also tend to be excessively sincere and worried about their feelings. Working on campus is eggshell city. Someone once said that the academic politics are so dirty because the stakes are so low, but that’s only part of it. Academic politics are so nasty mostly because the people are such neurotic, self-obsessed, narcissists.

This is a taxonomy of the most annoying of those delicate, fragile, egotistical, snotty, neurotics we all work with at the university. Universities and schools are no different from the private sector in one annoying respect: The frequency of pointless meetings. So before we get to our nuttier types, let’s deal with those categories of colleagues who are particularly annoying in meetings.

The Earnest Attendee

You know him. He’s the one who looks puzzled when he hears somebody say, "Not another meeting!" He asks for clarification at every opportunity, often saying, "Let me see if I got this," then repeating everything that was just said. Worst of all, when the pointless meeting is finally almost over, he always prolongs it by asking at least seven questions. After the meeting, he will always try to corner somebody to talk more about the meeting, because he’s obsessed with the fear that maybe, he missed something (when there was nothing to miss in the first place).

The Meeting Addict

You know him, too. He’s the one who’s always saying, "Maybe we should have a meeting …" and the first time he said it, you laughed because you thought it was a joke. It was no joke. He was serious, and you’ve hated him from the minute you realized it. He’s the reason for a third of the pointless meetings you have to sit through, and still, there aren’t enough for him. He’s usually very sincere, the sort who’s always talking about "concerns" or "feelings" rather than anything of substance, much like:

The Excessively Sincere Colleague

Meet Larry. Larry is always gratingly annoying, although he’s much, much worse in meetings, since otherwise, you can avoid him. Larry is extremely PC, you know, the type who spends half the time he’s talking apologizing beforehand just in case, instead of getting to the frakking point (at least partly because Larry never has a point; speaking is merely an excuse to apologize for his penis). Larry speaks at every opportunity, and never has anything useful to say; instead, he always says things like, "Something you said concerns me," or "How do you feel about that?" or "What are the implications of that?" (when "that" had no substance in the first place), or worst of all, "Let’s create a committee to explore this issue." Of all your colleagues, Larry is one of those you most want to strangle until his eyes pop out of his head.

Life on campus isn’t only meetings (though yes, I know it sometimes seems like it is). So let’s move on to the colleagues who are annoying everywhere.

The Illiterate Pedant

Surely, you know Martha. Martha can only talk about one thing: How illiterate her students are, and often, everybody else. She’s always telling you how many grammatical errors her students made, or how bad their spelling is, and for some reason, never talks about the course content. After all this, Martha then passes out reports at meetings with such demonstrations of her superior education as “independant,” and–wait for it–”grammer,” and never met a homophone she could get right, so every time she means “website” she writes “websight,” and forget “discreet” and “discrete.” Even though they bear directly on what she teaches, Martha will never get those straight. Even basic definitions confuse her. Martha’s the one who always writes “flaunt” when she means “flout,” and can’t remember the difference between “disinterested” and “uninterested” (or spell either one). Martha is also blissfully ignorant of such silly little details as subject-verb agreement, dangling modifiers, capitalization and the distinction between proper and common nouns, and basic punctuation (she’s eternally confused by semicolons, and she will argue with you for hours, insisting that “none always takes a plural verb,” for example)–though she never splits in infinitive or ends a sentence with a preposition! You wonder how much she had to pay somebody to proofread her dissertation, at least when you’re not wondering how she got out of elementary school. In meetings, when the topic of grammar or spelling has come up, Martha has been known to shoot out of her seat and say, “I’m the expert on that here!”

The Technophilic Techno-Idiot

Meet Sandra. Sandra has the latest everything. Like the kids on South Park, she lines up waiting for the store to open to buy the very latest technology on the day it hits the shelves. She has the latest iPod, iPhone, and iToilet. She eats, drinks, breathes, lives, and sleeps technogadgetry. And she’s a tecnho-idiot. When you are unfortunate enough to have to work with her, she pulls up Microsoft Word to create a simple list of text items (Notepad is too hard for her, as, apparently, are a pencil and paper). When she needs to do a simple calculation, she pulls up Excel, even though she’s got a frakking math degree. She can’t send a simple email message. Instead, she attaches a Word file. She loves to send everybody in the department those e-post cards where you have to go to some website and register to see the damned thing. And when she discovers how to create PDF files, your life becomes a living hell.

The Technophobic Techno-Idiot

Meet Janine. Janine is a throwback to 1985. Janine has a computer, supplied by taxpayer funds, but refuses to use it unless forced. She used the ditto machine until somebody finally threw it out, she whined and raised hell about it for six months afterward, and she refused to use the Xerox machine until the following academic year. Every time you run into her in the hall, she starts bitching about having to use computers, Xerox machines, anything invented after the wheel. She’s like a broken record. When she does have to use the computer, she has to call IT so they can tell her which icon to click to read her email, which icon to click to reply to email, which icon to click to send email, and which icon to click to log off. It’s amazing they don’t have to tell her how to hang up the telephone. I watched Janine use the Xerox machine once. She put a book on the machine, pressed the button, and the copy came out. She looked at the copy, then turned the page, but flipped the book around. She pressed the button. and the copy came out, but turned 180 degrees from the first. Instead of turning the copy around, she threw it away, and turned the book around to make another copy. I watched her do this for a grand total of 27 pages. She had thrown away (and re-copied) 20 of those pages.

The General Whiner

Meet Jack. Every time you see him way down the hall coming your way, you duck down the nearest corridor or into the nearest room to avoid him, and if you can’t, you beat your head against the wall. Jack corners any human being he sees and whines. "I don’t understand why my students have to take a departmental exam!" "I don’t understand why they let these students take my class!" "I’ve got 332 students this semester!" "Are you done grading yet? I have hours of grading to do! I just hate all this grading!" and so it goes, for hours, unless you can chew your hand off to get out of the trap.

The Paranoid Wackjob

Meet Wallace. Wallace is a lot like Jack (our whiner), but with a neurotic, slightly disturbing, and extremely irritating twist: Everything is a plot to take him ("us" when he corners you) down. Wallace insists that the university supplies faculty with tax-funded computers to spy on them. When his computer is scheduled to be upgraded, or needs to be worked on, Wallace will not let IT into his office unless he is there, hovering over them, to make sure they don’t bug his office, or whatever it is that obsesses him. Wallace loves to complain that departmental exams are a violation of his autonomy and an attempt by the government to control him. Wallace is also a conspiracy theorist, which he loves to tell you about, and like Jack, he corners any human being he sees. Wallace needs to be institutionalized.

The Misplaced Kindergarten Teacher

Meet Louise (actually, nearly all ed school faculty would fall into this category). Louise is in full kindergarten-teacher-mode, 24/7, and not just with her students, but everybody. She’s the one who speaks very slowly and deliberately, always in that kindergarten first-person-plural, always in that squeaky kindergarten-teacher voice ("And how are we today!"), and not just to her students, but to you. To the department chair. To the dean. Everybody. Louise is the one who comes to meetings with a big poster board drawn up, which she always has to "present" and explain every little colored circle. Whenever Louise is speaking, your chair suddenly shrinks and you feel like you’re in elementary school. Kill her. Kill her now. And not unlike her is:

The Perky Colleague

I don’t know what it is, but this one is always a woman. It’s 7:15 am, it’s Finals Week, you have four hours of reviews to face (and prepare for), you feel like hell, and she bounces into your office with a bright and cheery, “Good morning!” with her head bouncing from side to side. You put your head in your hands and groan, and she says, “Cheer up! The semester’s almost over!” Yes, she’s really nice, and you almost feel guilty about wanting to kill her.

The Needy Colleague

Needy people annoy me in general, and I get more than my fair share of needy from students–but we get paid to help students, and that’s the difference. Needy people with PhDs, well, if you’ve never encountered this particular beast, you’re in for a treat. Of all your colleauges, they have the most fragile and over-inflated egos and the most delicate sensibilities. And they always need your help. Like John. The only thing we can figure is that, like Larry, our excessively sincere colleague (above), John’s testicles never descended. John cannot wipe his butt without seeking validation. John treats everybody like his girlfriend–not a romantic girlfriend, the kind women have. John would come into the office, plop down, and without noticing that I was conveying unambiguous apathy (and a sudden fascination with my computer screen), start telling me about the latest traumatic event and asking me all sorts of, well, female questions, like "Should I have done that?" "Would you have done that?" "Do you think I should do this?" "Do you think I should do that?" and even if you say, "I don’t care," he keeps asking those questions. Even when he invades your space to ask questions about something that actually matters, like grading or the course, you want to wall him up with bricks (For the love of God, Montressor!) He’s the colleague you want to ask, "Have you ever done anything on your own?"

The Misery Addict

Meet Jana. Jana thrives on misery. She will back you against the wall just so she can tell you how miserable she is. Everything makes her miserable. Her home. Her husband. Her kids. Her house. Her car. Her job. Her students. Grading. Teaching. Research. Everything makes her miserable, and her only joy in life is to make sure everybody knows how miserable she is. When you finally escape, you’re so depressed you almost want to slit your wrists.

The Gross Incompetent

This is the guy who can’t do anything right. Nothing. He’s a lousy teacher, he can’t communicate with his students so they come to your office hours instead, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, every time he turns in grades he ends up filing change of grade forms for half of them–and he thinks he’s the most intelligent person on the planet. Meet Tom, our gross incompetent. Before class every day, he would come into my office and ask me to go over everything with him, to make sure he understood it. Any questions he might submit for the exam were so bad they had to be tossed–until I stopped soliciting them from him, and he sent them anyway, so I just deleted them. Every time you see him, you seethe that he’s actually getting paid to be an incompetent moron. I know lots of him. Tom isn’t the only one.

And finally, most annoying of all:

The Student-hating Snob

Meet Mary. Mary is the most insufferable, egotistical, pinkie-up snob you’ve ever met. Mary studied in France, and never misses an opportunity to tell you all about it, or how many languages she speaks, or what an insufferable wine snob she is, or how extremely cultured she is. She’s as bad a teacher as the gross incompetent (above), but what makes her worse is that the reason Mary insists her students hate her is because they’re stupid. Or they don’t "appreciate" the importance of education, or her great genius. Mary’s the one who will say, in perfect seriousness, "Can you believe a student actually disagreed with me today? With me! Such arrogance!" In fact, the reason Mary is a hideous teacher is that she hates students because they’re not on the same social level as she, and she can’t be bothered to put in the work to be a good teacher. Mary’s the one who has "Office hours by appointment only" on her syllabus, to make herself as inaccessible to students as she can. Mary’s the one who cancels half her classes because she can’t be bothered. Mary’s the one who is always saying, "This is a research university" in meetings whenever teaching comes up. And Mary’s disdain for students bleeds beyond the university. She’s the one who tries to get a zoning law passed to keep students out of her neighborhood (though she gladly takes their tuition). When she manages to corner you, she only talks about one thing: How incredibly intelligent she is, and how stupid somebody else is, usually, her students. Her students, by the way, hate her–and so do I.

And here endeth the list of the Most Annoying Colleagues. If I’ve left any out, feel free to add them in the comments. Other education articles here.