"You really need to relax!"

Nothing is more infuriating than having an incompetent individual tell me to relax. Some people may say that I'm an uptight perfectionist who thinks that anything short of obsessive-compulsive perfection is incompetent, but these people are obviously using a less-than-perfect definition of competence.

I kid!

I think that people who think I'm a perfectionist just can't believe that there's so much incompetence in the universe. On the other hand, it may just be that a lot of incompetent people tend to gravitate to me. It's as if I'm the star in the centre of the Incompetent Solar System. I think the problem is that I tend to clean up people's messes. I'm like Vincent Wolf in Pulp Fiction: I fix problems. And the person who fixes problems is the person to be near if you're incompetent.

I had this boyfriend who used to do everyone else's job at his place of employment. One time I crabbed to him that he was always cancelling plans with me because of work while his coworkers routinely called in sick to go see movies. My boyfriend explained to me that he had found that whenever he relied on his coworkers, they would do inadequate jobs and he'd end up fixing their messes. He figured he would just skip the middle step and just do everything himself. Unfortunately, doing everything himself required several hours of overtime that cut in to our time together. (In case you're wondering, the relationship didn't last long.)

His attitude somehow rubbed-off on me. Superficially, it makes sense: if you want your organization to work smoothly despite the obstructionist dunces around you, you better be prepared to do most of the work yourself. In truth, though, not only does it saddle you with all the work, but it excuses all the incompetent people from any type of improvement or accountability, and totally enables their lazy-ass habits! Unfortunately, if you stop enabling them, these incapablos will drop the ball with possibly disastrous results. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "If you stop enabling these doofuses, won't they get fired and solve your problem?" That might work in industry (and I'm not convinced of that), but it sure as shootin' won't work in a volunteer organization. The sad thing about volunteer organizations is that no one can fire volunteers, so when a volunteer doesn't fullfill their duties and no one covers for them, bad things happen. I learned this the hard way when I decided to leave a not-so-reliable person in charge of a rather mundane assignment.

The student organization I was heading was throwing a party for the grad students in our department. I put this one girl in charge of getting stereo equipment for the party. She had a week to get everything and I had sent her the URL of a webpage with all the information she'd need to reserve the equipment. I kept in touch with her during the week, asking her how things were going, trying to keep her motivated and on top of things. As the week progressed, I ended up holding her hand and walking her through all the things she needed to do (all the things listed on the website I had told her about). On the day of the party, I found out that she hadn't reserved the equipment. I avoided the urge of reserving the equipment myself and instead let a friend of mine, who used to be a manager, talk to her.

An hour later, my ex-manager friend called me up to tell me he'd reserved the equipment after it became obvious that Our Girl Unreliable wasn't about to. She showed up for the party and told me she'd had a bad week. She said she was glad everything worked out in the end.

It's really too bad that you can't fire volunteers because a lot of volunteers think that "volunteering" means "hanging around." They seem to think that because they aren't getting paid, they can do a completely half-assed job. No one's paying them, so they don't have to be responsible or even professional.

I also volunteer for a not-for-profit organization. I try to be early for my shifts because I've learned that things tend to go wrong. One of my fellow volunteers, Jill, doesn't feel the same way. She routinely shows up late and when she is on time, she's right on time. She thinks that showing up early and giving herself some leeway just in case something unexpected happens is evidence of a pessimistic view of life. She believes that plans and schedules are pointless because "life will happen" and plans will be ruined (how she can reconcile her view that things won't happen as planned with her feeling that it's pessimistic to give herself extra time to deal with unexpected events is beyond me).

When you volunteer, you end up working with a lot of donated equipment that is neither new nor reliable. One day the equipment Jill was supposed to use was broken. Jill had arrived right on time that day and a catastrophe was narrowly averted. I used this event to show Jill why she needed to get in early. I said, "Jill, remember that day when you showed up at the last minute and it turned out that the stuff you needed was busted? I had to cover for you for fifteen minutes while you looked for replacement equipment. Everyone was fifteen minutes late for another two hours because of it." (In reality, Jill didn't actually look for replacement equipment; instead she chose to stand behind me and tell me that the equipment was busted. I eventually leant her my own, personal equipment for her shift.) Jill just said, "Yeah, but it all worked out in the end." And it did -- for Jill. She left after her half hour. I had to stick around and I had to apologize to everyone for being late. I was the one who got told off for being late. All Jill had to say about everything was "You need to take a deep breath and relax! Life happens. You can't do anything about it."

And this, everyone, is why incompetent people remain incompetent. They think life "just happens," there isn't anything they can do about it, but things work out in the end. They don't realize that the reason things work out is because someone else is doing something about it. The competent people are out there fixing their messes and making sure everything works out and looks seemless. And when the competent people start freaking out because the incompetent people are dropping the ball, the incompetent people just see uptight people who don't understand that life just works out.

And this is why I call on all us competent people to stop enabling the incompetent! Sure, we'll probably get fired because we didn't do these other people's jobs, but if employers keep firing competent employees and volunteers, they will be left with the incompetent people. Their organizations will eventually fail while everyone waits for things to just "work themselves out." Eventually, employers will beg to have us back and pay us obscene amounts of money to keep them from being bought out by foreign investors from Luxemburg. Either that or the incompetent people will eventually learn some life skills and we'll be able to peacefully coexist with them. Either way, everyone wins.