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Is Drowning Them an Option?
Dear Work Friend,
I’m 13 years old, and I volunteer as an assistant to the lifeguards during my local pool’s swim lessons. There are eight volunteers — three girls and five boys — and our job consists mostly of standing in the water making sure that little Timmy doesn’t sink like a rock while practicing the front crawl. The lifeguards are also watching, of course, and the volunteers don’t need to be in the water unless the students outnumber the lifeguards.
The trouble is this. We are generally responsible for noticing whether or not we need to be in the water, and not all the volunteers need to be in the water. Usually, when our help is necessary, the other girls and I end up helping while the boys keep playing baseball (or something), oblivious. When we try to get them to help, they avoid it.
What annoys me even more, though, is that they (the boys) have figured out that I am a complete nerd, and seem to find this entertaining. They insist on me telling them a “fun fact of the lesson” during any session when they are not too busy playing baseball. I enjoy telling them things, even though I know they don’t want to know — they just want to laugh at me. But I struggle to find facts that I am really comfortable sharing in front of the young children, because most of the facts I find fun are related, in some way, to murder or corpses. (I have to know these things! I want to be a forensic pathologist or a private detective when I grow up.) Also, the boys have never stopped shouting “By Jove!” at anything remotely startling (e.g., someone getting a home run) after I muttered it when I was kicked by a 5-year-old doing a handstand, because they find it entertaining to mock my inexplicable old-fashionedness. Again, I don’t mind personally — it is a weird thing to say — but it disrupts class, and, as I’ve said, they don’t help with class.
I think that either the boys should start to pull their own weight or they should stop relying on me to entertain them when they don’t. But I suspect that anyone I talk to will just say something along the lines of “That’s just how teenage boys are” and do nothing. Or I could get revenge — this would be my preferred outcome — but I haven’t a clue how to do that. I have some ideas, but they are rather problematic in their implementation, and they’re not particularly sporting anyway. (I am willing to be a jerk, but I have to be fair about it.) What should I do?
— Anonymous
The unfortunate fact is that you are dealing, at age 13, with an eternal workplace problem, one that affects local pools and Fortune 500 companies alike (and, presumably, forensic pathology labs and private-detective firms as well): shirkers who palm off work and mask their lack of contribution with overfriendliness.
You say your colleagues’ teasing doesn’t bother you much on a personal level, and I can respect that. As behavior from 13-year-olds goes, this kind of needling attention isn’t the worst. If your main problem was merely that you had to deal with boys being socially annoying at work, I think I would advise you to ignore them until they moved on or turned 30, whichever came first.
But it seems to me — and I think you’ve realized this — that the mostly innocuous repartee is also being used to establish an atmosphere of clubby “fun” that excuses the way they’ve foisted their work on you and the other girls. So long as you play along, even begrudgingly, it’s easy for them to fool the lifeguards and any onlooking adults (and maybe even themselves) into thinking everything about the current arrangement is fine.