resentful, unpredictable group project member

[resonance]

I am doing a group project for a class in my master's program. One of the other members - a college senior in a pilot undergrad-MS program - has been angry and upset at her pilot program; the class we're in (she stated she'd drop out if the project requirements were as anal as we were saying, and they are, but she's not dropping out); and me. Specifically, I brought up using a specific software feature to help us collaborate, she wasn't using that software, I found out that it was available in the software she was using, and I asked twice or maybe more whether using it was okay with everybody, and no one objected, so I used it for my next draft and uploaded that to our project website.

She wrote a very upset email to the list shortly afterward begging everyone to PLEASE PLEASE not use it, saying it doesn't work with her software.

Someone else using the same software had no problems, and it seems very likely she simply didn't know what the output was supposed to look like. The problem for me, though, is that although she did not object to my using it when I brought it up ahead of time, after I used it she responded as though she had already informed me it didn't work and I had inappropriately gone ahead and used it anyway, despite how difficult it would make things for her.

This particular issue - someone agreeing to, or refraining from raising objections to a course of action I've put forth for discussion, and then attacking me for it afterward, makes me much more upset than is warranted, especially when no one else will back me and there is no authority I can reasonably appeal to. It's not the actual attack, it's what it indicates about the working relationship: that I will be attacked out of the blue, that no one will support me or even indicate that she might have behaved inappropriately, and that people may resent me for disturbing the group by having been attacked.

I obsess about it in my head over and over, and withdraw and stop talking to people, even people unrelated to the project, because I can't talk about what's going on because people will think I'm being unreasonable and am to blame for what happened and responsible for ensuring it doesn't happen again. It does not help that I also sent out an email to the group saying I wanted to make sure that if anyone was uncomfortable with my inability to pull late nights for medical reasons they would speak up so that I could see about leaving the group, and to please let me know either way, and two of my group members didn't respond, despite our communication covenant stating that we would respond to all emails requiring responses within 48 hours.

The thing to fix here isn't the obsessing - that's to try to keep me prepared for an attack so that my emotional reaction will not be as severe. Yes, I know a severe emotional reaction is overreacting, but unfortunately the fact that it's an overreaction doesn't make it voluntary. The thing that might be fixable is my ability to manage the reaction so that similar events won't be as severely upsetting - if I could know I wouldn't be so hysterical as to be nonfunctional for some amount of time, I would be fine.

I don't know how to do that.

[reddog]

ow!! my sympathies.

[resonance]

thanks.

...also, our most recent agreement was that we would put edits in a different font color so that someone could accept them by converting them all to black font - and I just discovered that when she submitted the document she left all my edits in, so that there are green words and phrases scattered throughout. I think she may not have even opened the document. (It's her explicit project role to be the one who pulls all the edits together and produces the final draft at the end.)

[celestia]

if I could know I wouldn't be so hysterical as to be nonfunctional for some amount of time, I would be fine.

I don't know how to do that.

I think this sums up our mutual quest for a cure to life. "People are hell". Sartre

Betrayal, blindsided betrayal all that is really hard to blow off. I can totally relate, I do a lot of "positive self-talk" psycho babble I know, but til I can dump it on my therapist I chew on my personal grievances like a dog with a bone. Woof.

S9

[r.mcmurphy]

if it was Halloween-a flaming bag of poop would be in order. so don't let the hoople get under your skin.

she's the one with the intractable problems not you.

[Greenyflower]

I've worked with people like that and it's no fun. But from what you've described, you've been handling it well despite your obsessing over it. When she begs everyone not to use the software, give yourself time to rant for awhile and then respond by reiterating the original agreement, reminding the group that she did not object when the plan could have been changed, but now this is the way we're going to do it.

And with the green edits left in, it seems that either she's overwhelmed and trying to cover it up by lashing out, or she just likes to stir the shit because it deflects the group's attention away from her ineptitude.

Don't let her make this your fault.

I feel for you. It's hard enough to lead a group without someone trying to sabotage it with their personal drama.

Good luck.

Can you kick her out of the group?

[null0trooper]

thanks.

...also, our most recent agreement was that we would put edits in a different font color so that someone could accept them by converting them all to black font - and I just discovered that when she submitted the document she left all my edits in, so that there are green words and phrases scattered throughout. I think she may not have even opened the document. (It's her explicit project role to be the one who pulls all the edits together and produces the final draft at the end.)

If you're the only one making edits, what use is this other person in "pulling all the edits together"?

Obviously you're all barely in preproduction, so the figures and tables aren't cut in - just partial in-text references that get double-checked in the final edit/review - so at this point you all can work from an ASCII text document. Would THAT be too hard for the kid, to find a compatible editor that can handle that file format? It even has the benefit of making the changes seem untraceable!

[resonance]

Thanks, Greeny. I think part of the reason I'm so upset is that I've been fairly stable, and so this seems threatening to it. But when I'm not actively obsessing I'm actually still pretty okay.

Null: She's running Open Office, and we'd verified the day before that it could accurately read font color changes in .doc files, and had a discussion about how the reason we would use font color changes specifically was so that later editors could convert to black anything that they liked. Luckily, I decided to be lazy and interpret that as turn anything I add green (which leaves no trail about what people delete or rewrite, which is the point of the original feature we were going to use), rather than maintain a dual copy of my new text and the old text. So it just looks silly, rather than truly bad.

There were actually two people who'd made edits before me, and I put up one draft and then said I'd look over it again later after there were more edits. I was actually expecting someone in the group to want to check what I'd done, and actively expecting the person responsible for submitting the final assignment to, minimally, open up the document. It's possible she did that and decided to leave it like it was.

[Velvet Elvis]

Had I been in your group I'd have suggested LaTeX in a subversion repository just to be obnoxious.

Can word export to ODF? That's an ISO standard that is supported by most modern word processors. Exporting to HTML might also be easier to deal with.

The problem with .doc files is that they are not backwards compatible. Microsoft changes the spec with each new version of Word just to break compatibility with OpenOffice.org and to force windows users to upgrade in order to collaborate with users of the new version. It takes a while for the OpenOffice.org people to reverse engineer the changes. If you're using Word 2007 you need to save to say, Word2000 to ensure compatibility with the rest of the world.

[resonance]

Word 2007 can save in 1997-2003 format, and I set it to do that automatically. (I had 2000, and needed to upgrade to at least 2003 for a feature I needed in grading assignments - a step more advanced than the one I actually proposed using, which has been available since at least 2000.)

At any rate, the problem isn't the technology we're using (at least now that the engineer in the group realized that a text editor might not give him the formatting capabilities he needed). Everyone's current tech appears to be able to handle what I want to do (and what we agreed to do); the problem is asking people to learn an existing feature.