Auntie SparkNotes: Can I Please Exclude This Horrible Person?
Dear Auntie,
How does one be exclusive without bullying?
There is this girl in my Chem class, let’s call her “Tel”, and I don’t want to be in a group with her.
In my Chemistry class there are labs where we have to make groups in order to do them and submit a lab report. Everyone usually picks their friends. The problem is that these groups can be up to four people and Tel doesn’t seem to have her friends in that class.
I would feel sorry for her and want to be inclusive, except she is a horrible human being and working with her is like torture. I know this because I had agreed to be her partner in my Physics class last semester. She went around asking everyone for help except me, ignore my attempts to fix problems, screamed at me, had her mother insult me, told on me to her friends, embarrassed me in front of my classmates, refused to let me work on the project, proceeded to call me and my friends annoying, and behaved extremely rudely to all of us (saying I personally don’t have friends because I’m mean).
Her kicking and screaming is something I do NOT want to go through again. If this was assigned groups I would get over it but it is a group of my choosing, and to be honest after all she has said, I want to be spiteful. I also worry because even though my friend in the class agrees with me, she always says yes to letting people into our groups. Tel has excluded me before in groups because one of her friends didn’t like me, telling me so to my face.
What I’m trying to get at is, isn’t it fair to do that to her? I mean don’t I have the right to completely exclude her? What are the best ways to tell her no?
The best ways? Hmm. How about laughing in her face for a full sixty seconds, doing a series of pelvic thrusts, and then hiring an airplane to fly overhead dragging a banner that says “NOT IN A MILLION FREAKIN YEARS”?
At least, that seems the most appropriate response in the highly unlikely event that Tel actually asks to be part of your lab group. (The second-most-appropriate response: Smacking her in the face with a radioactive beehive full of mutant monster bees.)
Because I’ll be honest, Sparkler: Assuming that your version of events is accurate, considering what a miserable jerk this girl was the first time you ended up on a project together, it is absolutely unfathomable that she would want to repeat that experience—let alone that she’d have the balls to approach you about it. She’d have to be out of her damn mind.
But more to the point, so would you, to agree to work with her again. The way things worked out the last time around pretty much gives you a free pass to say no in any way you want to, from “You’ve got to be kidding me,” to “No, absolutely not,” to “Considering your behavior the last time we worked together, I’m gonna have to politely decline lest I feel compelled to murder you.” Inclusivity is a lovely and worthy thing, but it is eclipsed as a goal in this case by your reasonable desire not to share a bunsen burner with a loathsome, abusive person.
So if you were looking for permission to not invite Tel into your group, then congratulations: You’ve got it.
Please realize, though, that this is not the same thing as permission to spite her for the sake of spite itself. The way she treated you was awful, obviously, and it’s okay to be angry about it. But choosing not to work with her doesn’t have to (and really shouldn’t) be an act of vengeance; for it to be an act of sensible, reasonable self-preservation is more than enough. The primary reason to avoid teaming up with her in the future is that you want to avoid useless conflict with someone who hates your guts, not that it’ll make her feel bad.
Although if it does make her feel bad, I suppose you can take a little bit of satisfaction in it. But only a little.
There, that’s enough.
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