Fear or Respect - One Motivates the Other

Two days ago, I talked about how I didn't like the fact that people tend to mistake being cautious for fear, and I tried to explain that although I think there's a thin line between both things, there are also very different.

Well today, due to a personal experience that I had, I'm here to talk about fear and respect and how people mistake one for the other.

_{photo by Claudio Schwarz}

Earlier today I had visited my school to go finalise the collection of my result. I've been working on the process for about a month now and today was the day where I had completed the final steps and eventually collected the result.

You see, if there's a group of people that I hate to have any form of contact with, it is the non-academic staffs at my school, because this people always want to feel important, so what they do when you go to their office (which probably would be once or twice during your entire five year academic session), they try to exert their dominance on you, and try to make you see how important they're by making your life hell.

It is for this reason that during the entire process of me trying to collect my result, I had paid a guy to help me handle the entire process. Unfortunately, the last step required me being present because I had to give them my ID card and they needed to confirm that the guy collecting the result was indeed the owner of the result.

So I went, and a process that was suppose to take me about an hour, lasted for more than five hours. And no, this wasn't just five hours of me sitting down and waiting for it to get to my turn, this was five hours of me running around the entire school, trying to photocopy this and that, while also being told to go to this office to do that, or go to that office to do this.

And of course, we can't forget the constant begging and just trying to lick these people's arse just so that they could do the job they're being paid to do. I think that's what pisses me off the most, because I'm not asking for any favours, all I needed them to do was exactly what they were employed to do.

But funny enough, the focus of today's blog won't be about the torture I went through today just to get this result, it is about the way I felt when entering each and every one of those offices.

You see, I'm a very respectable guy. I'm rarely rude to people and most times would only be rude to you if you're being rude to me, which rarely happens. So naturally when I go into these offices, I go by being my respectable self and all. But today, I realized that although I was being respectful, it wasn't just an ordinary respect, it didn't feel like it to me.

Rather, it felt like a respect motivated by fear. You see, although you might get to see these people only twice during your five year course, that first meeting is enough to put the fear of God in you, so I know that one mess up from me, and I might not see my result for the rest of the year.

So having that in mind, I found myself being a little too careful with every word that came out of my mouth, I found myself playing the role of the perfect grandson to these women (they were mostly women), I found myself laughing to their dry jokes and basically just being their bitch (forgive my french).

And I know that most of you might not see anything wrong with it, you might see it as me being polite, but it really wasn't. It was me being scared because like I said, I've had my fair share of these people's wickedness and I know how powerful they can be when you need them, when you're in their world, so I was terrified and just wanted to get everything over with so that I could run away from them.

Luckily for me, I got it all sorted out and now I'm done. But the best part of all of this is that I will never get to see these people again, or at least not in a position where I have to pretend to find everything they do to be funny...because it is very hard to fake a laugh.