Playing Well With Others

When I got out of the software world, I thought my days of dealing with misogynists were, by and large, over. Apparently no, that is not the case.

I run Awana at our church. It's a Bible memory/discipleship program from ages 2 through high school. So we have a lot of leaders (45 this year, I believe) to handle the ~200 kids who attend. I have no problems with any of my leaders. Except one.

This guy simply refuses to accept that I'm in charge. Now honestly, I try to leave him alone. He knows what he's doing, and he does it well. I try to make sure he knows I'm available if he needs anything but otherwise, I stay out of his hair. I tried, two-ish years ago, to sit down with him and see if we could integrate the high schoolers into the general flow of the club a bit more and that was a disaster. He basically said that I have nothing to offer any aspect of what he does. So fine. Whatever.

The one thing that does have to be integrated is the end of the year awards. Which were tonight. I spend a lot of hours for 2 weeks leading up to the awards getting everything organized and ready in hopes of having the ceremony move quickly and steadily through. So I send out a list of the kids who've completed books and what award they're getting and the order that we'll go through everything in the ceremony. I ask for feedback. I get radio silence.

So okay, great. I get there today three hours ahead of the program to set up. It takes basically all three of those hours. I set the awards out in order so that it's a simple matter of read the name grab the next award.

We go through everything, it's running smoothly, and we get to this guy. This guy who has put his own script together with everyone in a different order, and he's all mad that the awards aren't where they're supposed to be. Except they ARE where they're supposed to be according to what I came up with after no input from him.

So I whisper that hey, you missed some. And he's all "I'm doing this my way."

And it's all I can do not to stand there on the platform at the front of the church and say, "Asshole."