Monday, July 1, 2013

Don't be a d!ck

You know what is so annoying? When someone misses an opportunity to help a person like me out and instead chooses to be a bit of a d!ck and make me feel worse about myself. I am not talking about letting me walk around with food in my teeth, toilet paper on my shoe or with my fly open. Although I have done all three and subsequently cursed the person or persons I had been in contact with prior for not letting me know. TIP: You may feel like you're being a jerk telling me about those things, but you're actually being helpful. But that is not what I am talking about here, now. I am talking about us all trying to help each other out, rather than magnifying our individual shortcomings.

Sometimes I look tired. We all do. But being told you look tired sucks. No one wants to hear that. Telling us we look like sh!t (because I'm pretty sure that is synonymous with "you look tired") is highly inadvisable too. If we are actually as sleep deprived as we look, we may be teetering close to the edge of snapping.

Maybe ease into it a bit. Tell me about a great place to get a massage for not a lot of money where I can fall asleep on the table. Tell me how the hours of sleep we get before midnight are the most valuable to our bodies. Tell me about a new under eye cream that eliminates all signs of fatigue. Just do me a favor, don't tell me how tired I look. I probably know that already, so you're just making me feel worse about the situation.

Also, if you know I am going to miss a deadline (and when am I not?), please try to help me out. I have a thing with deadlines. That thing is, I don't really heed them. I am not very responsible. I believe deadlines exist for the sole purpose of making me feel bad for being the irresponsible jerk I am. I suck at RSVPing to Evites or Paperless Posts partially because my stupid phone never lets me do it through my email, and partially because I forget to go back and do it when I get home. 

My daughter begins school in the fall. Her preschool hosted an orientation night at the beginning of June where they handed out folders containing all the paperwork we needed to hand in by June 27th. June 27th. The head administrator even made all of the parents repeat, in unison, the date out loud in the auditorium to acknowledge we all knew what the deadline was; arguably treating us like juvenile imbeciles, which proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Hey, if you want to treat me like an irresponsible idiot, that is exactly how I will behave.

That is why on June 28, when I received an email to all of the scatter-brained parents telling us that we had missed the due date, I was annoyed, but not completely shocked.
Deadline shaming: I repeated the date out loud along with 40 other parents, yet still managed to miss it.
My question is this: (and this will identify one of my many unmarketable skills: deflection) Why didn't they just send the email the day before instead of the day after? Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate being given the benefit of the doubt that I would get my sh!t together and get the paperwork in on time, but surely someone was going to forget and they would inevitably need to send the follow-up email regardless. So, if they knew they were going to have to send an email to the parents, why not do it the day, or a few days before the deadline and hook us all up? Everyone loves a reminder. It helps those of us that don't ever feel responsible feel somewhat more responsible. Had they sent it before the deadline, we all have a full day or two to get the paperwork in, with time to spare for patting ourselves on the back. But instead, they send the reminder the day after the paperwork is due, highlighting our inefficiency and irresponsibility... and if you're me, catching me out of the house and unable to do anything about it for a few hours, thereby amplifying my anxiety along with my self-loathing. 

So a note to everyone who has ever asked for anything by a certain date: rather than sending out a "you f#$%ed it up again" email, send out a "there's still time to not f#$% it up" email. I would so prefer it. Don't think you're being annoying by checking in before the deadline. Think of all the egos you are saving.

And to those who will persist with the "follow-up" email, all I am saying is, you might think you are being helpful, but I think secretly you know you're being kind of a dick.