It has been a long, fairly unhappy week for me. There have been a few tiny frustrations, too, that have added to my feelings of dread. For instance, Elfwood has been down all week and because of massive data loss, everything is gone from after early February. As a moderator, I'll have to pick up my socks and get some extra moderating done in order to pick up some of the mess. Also, I keep not getting ahold of the people I need to speak to. This has meant phone tag and email tag. I hate those games. But, far and away, the worst thing has been my social interaction with my classmates.

Last Saturday, I received an email from the management group (part of the subsections in our exhibit development team) that wanted to be polite and professional but actually came across cold, vague, and shockingly impersonal. It stated that my performance as part of the team was poor and needed to be improved. Okay, I can deal with criticism; I'm not 15 anymore. Unfortunately, the email did not explain how I failed in my responsibilities and moreover, hit me in the the head out of nowhere. Yikes. I was furious, especially since the email originated from my friend's email account. She and I have talked very candidly together for a long time now, and getting this letter from her was really awful.

I responded to their email, which, by the way, was copied to the class instructor, Deb, with whom I had some baggage, thanks to an earlier attempt to deal with stuff. My email managed to be mostly polite, but at one point, I did get a bit snarky. Ah well, considering how angry I was, I guess one little snark-out isn't that bad. Anyway, my answer also copied the instructor and demanded a meeting to discuss the matters in person when I returned to Peterborough from Toronto, the following day. Well now, their answer came pretty quickly, and they answered my demand with a time and place to meet (the following day at the Tim Horton's near the museum). I accepted and then had only to wait, getting progressively more nervous.

So, talking about it was very good, and we came out of it pretty unscathed, with the understanding that they would send an email detailing the outcome of the meeting to me, copying, again, the instructor. They did this, which was nice, and it was a much nicer, gentler, more personal message than the first one had been. The problem is; however, my classmates, presumably the ones who raised the complaint in the first place, do not know about how we sorted things out and as a result, a while bunch of people now think of me only in a negative light. Again, I can handle it - rejection is something I've gotten quite used to, and my friends seem genuinely bothered by what's happened.

What is even worse, and extremely childlish, is that not only am I viewed as a slacker, but I'm getting the "silent treatment" from a few classmates (fewer at this point than on Monday), and am being treated as a pariah for group work. My teammates even went so far as to strip me of my responsibility as a speaker at the opening event (detailed somewhat, below). So. Needless to say, I've felt really uncharming this past week, and even did some good, old fashioned crying. With two weeks of the programme left to go (that's six assignments, yet), this was really not the way I'd hoped to end it.

In other, but related, news, yesterday was the official opening of our exhibit, "A Century of Celebrations in Peterborough: 1905-2005". I was there ahead of time to help with the set-up of the food/drink tables and do some cleaning and moving around of furniture. Rather than giving the speach, I spent most of the time in the exhibit answering people's questions and doing stuff not to get bored. Speaking of boring, the speaches did go on a little bit long, but considering the number of speaches given, I guess it didn't take that long. At any rate, it went off basically without a hitch and everything looked great, even the ga-ga podium from which people spoke.

Now, I'm literally sitting here in the phone dungeon (as I have been since 9am) waiting for my break person t come and relieve me so I can hop over to The Second Cup for a decent cup of coffee. A decent, LARGE cup of coffee. I normally don't doze off while working, but just a moment ago, I -thought- I was deep in thought, but actually discovered that my eyes were closed, I'd typed a nonsensical sentence, followed by four lines of lowercase "i". I'm certainly glad that no one was here to witness that little whoopsie. Come on break !