Bratty Bratterson

I'm a military brat. I've spent most of my life moving from one place to the next, sometimes as often as every year. Out of the two kids, me and my brother "R", everyone thought that I was quite well adjusted to the process and even enjoyed moving. Apparently I was a great actress. It's actually ironic that today I'm quite the hermit and despise even the thought of moving and my brother has no qualms at all about it.

Now, I'm not talking about loathing the actual move - who doesn't. I'm talking about starting over, building a network. As a single person, I estimate this takes a minimum of three years. If you are married or even married with kids there is almost an instant network - whether it is your spouses work friends, your kids friends parents, the PTA, whatever. To paraphrase Forrest Gump, Single is as Single does, i.e., I do everything singly.

Tonight I had to go to a social activity for work. I'm not good at the mingling thing when everyone already knows each other and has cliqued up. I'm not the kind of person who will just break into a clique and start chatting. Not going to happen.

The biggest bummer this evening is it turns out that everyone is married. Apparently the company made an exception hiring me as it seems I'm the odd girl out.

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There is major drama in my grad school class. Because I am doing a distance learning program, we all have to be in teams or groups. You can have a minimum of 3 people in a team or no more than 6. When we started out we had 2 groups of 4 and 2 groups of 5. Well, "Team D" a former group of 5 has now dwindled to 2. The group, in general, has always been the weakest group in terms of the performance of each member. None of us were really surprised when there were only 2 left, but now this has caused a bit of a problem for the rest of us as the other groups do not want to add one or both of the leftover members to their teams...and if they don't move into another group, the leftovers have to drop the course. AND because our groups are "self-governing" the university claims it cannot tell us what to do and it is each group's decision.

So the other team of 5, "Team B" has flat out said they will not accept another member. Their team leader sent out an email saying that they already have 5 members and didn't feel it made sense to add another.

"Team C" all work at the same company way up north of the river here, and claim they would welcome the leftover girl, but only if she can attend their Thursday meetings way up in Catholic saint land.

My team, "Team A" does not want either of these leftovers. We are quite happy that we are clearly the best team and feel either one of these leftovers will only weaken our team. That being said, when emails began flying around about this issue, as team leader and team spokesperson, I said we would prefer not to add anyone (not knowing how the other teams felt yet) but that we, as team, were still discussing.

I have since received 3 nasty-grams. 1 from Team B and 2 from Team C. The team lead of B wrote a very innocuous email stating "it just doesn't make sense" for us to add another member...but never even mentioned that as they have 5, maybe it would make sense to remove a member and add that person to create a team with the leftovers...nope, not interested.

Team C wrote saying they were very disappointed that no other group would take the leftovers as well as they felt we were being very "childish". As I mentioned, the discussion amongst the group has been we don't want the leftovers, but we never said that to the broader population. We said we would prefer not to add anyone but that we were still discussion. The other teams have made significant assumptions - granted they are accurate, but assumptions none the less. I'm also irritated as Team C are acting as if there is some sort of secret malicious intention going on...talk about childish. We're the only ones being honest. The rest of them are acting as if their hands are tied. Oh, we'd love to add you but we already have 5...6 is the max you know, not 5! Or, we'd love to add you, if you can make a standing Thursday 5:30pm meeting that is at a minimum an hours drive away from you. Yes, open arms indeed.

So long story short, my team is basically going to get stuck with one of the leftovers. Boo.