Justice with an Attitude

From an unnamed university in the greater San Francisco Bay Area...

Last week I mentioned that we have an annual Spring Awards competition going on right now. All submissions that were turned in by the deadline were overnighted to our judging committee, which consists of local alumni. Most of the local alums are really cool about judging and have fun staying connected with the school and checking out the work that our students produce.

But it seems like there's always one who believes that the quality of the submissions turned in are not up to her arbitrary high standards and feels insulted that we would assault her eyes with such low-quality work. And furthermore, it makes her ashamed to be an alumna of a school where students think such shoddy work can be submitted for awards.

I've written back to her and tried to be sympathetic to the fact that these submissions not being up to her standards insults her self-image as a super-important judge of super-important things for this super-important contest, but the truth is that these are departmental, student awards whose existence means virtually nothing outside our little community.

I want to tell her that the problem isn't really with the submissions she received but her own notion that she is such a talented, high-ranking member of our alumni community and would only be tapped for the most crucial, high-level of tasks and that she doesn't feel like these submissions aren't worthy of the awards we give out every year, but in fact, not worthy of her.

But I want to keep my job so I wrote something nice. Saying it to you guys felt great though.