EVERYONE’S AN EXPERT
WORKING WITH A MONDAY-MORNING QUARTERBACK CAN BE A REAL CHALLENGE
The expert football fans come out in full force Monday mornings, questioning offensive play-calling by head coaches from coast-to-coast, just like they did during baseball season.
“I had to get off of Facebook and Twitter,” says Gary Schiff, a Chicago paralegal. “I get it. Some of the stuff I saw was upsetting to me, too, but I’m a 32-year-old paralegal who plays pick-up basketball and fantasy football. That’s it. I’m no expert.” Schiff says his reluctance to pile on local teams is at odds with most of his friends and relatives. “I turned off my phone at two in the morning because I was getting stuck in these text nightmares,” he says. “I mean, people were texting me 500 words at a time about scenarios. I couldn’t take it.”
Schiff says post-game reactions are similar to a situation he remembers from his previous job at a nonprofit organization in Springfield, Illinois, when a newly hired director decided to implement several new policies, including one aimed at increasing productivity. “He wanted to have daily meetings for us to share what we’d be working on for the day and people went berserk,” Schiff says. “You would have thought he killed someone. All he wanted was for us to meet for five or 10 minutes so we could talk about what we were doing for the day.”
Schiff says in that instance, he also kept quiet. “The biggest issue was that the people who’d stroll in at 9:30 or 10 had to be at the meeting at 9:15,” he says. “And the stuff they’d say — “he doesn’t know anything about nonprofits,” “he has no idea how to motivate us,” “he’s in way over his head.” — it was insane.”
That second-guessing continued until it reached the point of “no return,” Schiff says. “He ended up leaving after about six months for a job with the state. I think he loved the job but he could tell he was being criticized by everyone.”
Jealous much?
Bryan Richards, a career coach in Ocala, Florida, says he often works with clients who “spend our first 45 minutes together telling me everything wrong with their boss,” which is a red flag. “Oh, a huge red flag. More like a red flare across the sky,” he says.
The problem, Richards says, is that most people feel comfortable criticizing co-workers and bosses because they realize they don’t match up in terms of talent and experience. “Show me a guy who rips into his manager every day and I’ll show you a guy who is mediocre at best at his job,” Richards says. “The louder the criticism, the worse the talent.”
Paula Maiden, 45, agrees. “About 15 years ago, I worked at a hospital in Denver with a group of girls. We were pretty tight. Then one of us was promoted to supervisor and the claws came out. Jealous, jealous, jealous,” says Maiden, a registered nurse in Rochester, Minnesota. “The cattiest ones were the people I thought were the worst nurses on staff so yes, the biggest loudmouths are the worst employees.”
Maiden says the problem was that the supervisor had to continually deal with said and unsaid criticism from other nurses. “They always could do it better, or at least that’s what they’d say. It was nonstop, criticize this, criticize that,” says Maiden. “And the stuff they said about the doctors? Forget it.”
Human nature
Schiff says his wife often tells him that he’s too judgmental. “She says it’s just human nature to secondguess other people but I don’t buy it,” he says. “You listen to some of these guys rip into the coach or manager, they think they’re geniuses. And what did they do? Play little league ball at Portage Park on the weekends? Give me a break.”
Maiden says she’s heard the “human nature” line before, too, but like Schiff, she’s not buying it. “I don’t care if people question something if they’re quiet about it or if they talk directly to that person, but we’re talking about mean girls here,” she says. “It was petty and it really tore us apart as a group so you can say it’s human nature if you want, but in reality, it’s bad humans.”