Interpersonal conflict

Interpersonal conflict, a common problem to most of us, has played an imperative role in my life as I am grow up. Let me tell you guys a story that happened not long time ago. It took place in Rag I participated in this year.

*(What is Rag? Rag is one of the biggest projects in Kent Ridge Hall every year. A team of about 30 students will sacrifice their vacation (from May to early August) to build a float to appreciate donors who donate to the society via the Hall charity events. The amount donated could sometimes exceed 1 million in a year. One of the most interesting facts is we use recycled materials to clad the hand-made float. Rag is not an easy task. Everyone will understand it only when he or she experiences it as a member in the team. Please feel free to watch our performance at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUOIZCiyeEw if you are interested.)

For confidential purpose, I will disguise a character's identity and name him as ‘XX’ in the story.

Rag is a labor-intensive job, a blue-collar work, a slummy life. However, it is where you will find your good friends. Having a close-knit friendship was the main reason I decided to join rag. However, sometimes you might not get what you expected. One of the engineers, called XX, regretted to join rag. He didn’t like to work for a long time and in the midnight. He didn’t like to be obedient to his leader and didn’t work seriously.

One out of millions of examples was skinning dance blocks*. There were two dance blocks to skin and I was partnered with XX for the task. So, each of us should skin one dance block. As an experienced engineer, I demonstrated to him how to do it at the beginning. However, he didn’t follow what I taught him. I thought he found a better way to skin it and so I didn’t bother him. After skinning my dance block, I looked at his product.  (#@*&#:;%*@#...) No word could describe how lousy his product was. I didn’t say any words though. Well, bad news came in the next morning. The technical officer and chief engineer were disappointed with me. On the other hand, assistant chief engineer asked me to re-skin his dance block. I hated redoing so much. However, I still spent another 3 hours on his dance block and smiled at him. To avoid any quarrels to happen, what I could do was just suppressing my anger.

My anger at him grew up again when XX slept while all other people were working. A female engineer complained that XX had slept for many times. 

Enough is enough. We had been implicitly telling XX that we need his hands to complete the float. How did he dare to read novel books while others were sweating on their work? However, I still had to smile whenever he talked to me. Yea, I have finally realized why our Mr. Blackstone always says that some people smile when they are angry.  In fact, teamwork and friendship are important in Rag. We could never afford any fights among the members, or else we would never complete the float. That is why we were encouraged to tolerate with him. ACE indeed told me that he ignored XX’s existence in Rag.

Haiz… Can you tell me how a person could be so self-centered?  To accommodate ourselves with the timing on Rag day, whereby we could stay conscious for 48 hours, and also to complete the gigantic float in time, we worked from 12am to 6am, 18 hours every day in the last 2 weeks before the Rag day. I believed that we could rest more if he worked hard and didn’t leave at 3am every day. He didn’t change even after our Rag Chairperson had advised him.

To ensure that the big project could be done in time, I didn’t lose my temper with him but showed him that the whole team was like a family so that he would repent his irresponsibility. I didn’t scold him but was reminding him to contribute to the ‘family’. This was the solution I adopted. However, it didn’t work. Hey guys, how would you have encouraged XX to be responsible for his work? :D


  
  * The dance block is an item we used in Rag dance. Its structure is made of timber and skinned with plywood. "Skinning" is a jargon term in Rag, which basically means making skin for a item with frame only. Generally, we use plywood, cardboard, newspapers, or wire-mesh as materials for skinning.


I am sorry for the incomplete description. :)




(Edited)