We are are in the middle of baseball season here in the United States, and as in any sport where people succeed and fail in public and there is performance pressure, the situation is ripe to turn even mild-mannered people into temporary assholes, and of course, to unleash the full force of certified assholes. On that point, I got an instructive and entertaining email from Dave Coates, a senior HR manager and a guy who has served as an umpire now and then. Here is his story:
A few years ago I was an umpire for a local
softball organization. During the third inning in one game I blew a call
at second base. The coach for the negatively impacted team immediately
got in my face and spontaneously hit a full-blown asshole rage. I called
timeout and sent both teams to their respective dugouts and asked the coach to
join me in centerfield. His rage continued until I told him to shut-up or
the game was over. Once I had quiet, I told the coach that he was right,
I had blown the call and I was not going to reverse it. However, my
mistake did not cost his team any runs and earlier in the game his shortstop
had made two fielding errors that has cost his team three runs. I now
want to know why is it okay for him to get in my face and cuss me out based on
my error, but he never said a word to his shortstop when the errors had cost
his team runs. The coach was speechless. I then told him he had two
choices: 1) Shut the hell up and play the game with no further incident, or 2)
If the yelling at the umpire continued I would forfeit the game to other team
taking his team out of contention for the league championship. Needless,
to say the game was finished without further incident. To this day, the
coach is still an asshole.
One of the interesting things about this story is that Dave used the "Dirty Harry" method of conflict resolution — exercising the full powers of his position (I guess Dirty Harry went beyond the rules a lot, but Dave was fully in his rights). I believe that, when you have the power, and people are acting like flaming assholes, it is fully justified. Unfortunately, most of us don't have such power to deal with the assholes in our lives and must resort to more subtle methods.
Dave, thanks for the story!
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