Whoa? What?!
I wonder if there’s anyone reading this who remembers the 1996 Euro Cup; the happenings around the Dutch national team in particular. It took me a little while to find it, but let me show a photo that, hopefully, refreshes a bit of memory.
Actually, this is only a partial photo, but it shows the bits that I want to show. You’ll see the coach standing at the table of players in front. There’s a few tables to the left and right that have been cut out of this picture. The important thing to notice however, is the table at the back. Look at it for a second. Then look at the first table again. Noticed something yet? No? Okay, maybe I’ll have to drop a hint. Look at the skin colour of the players in front and then of the players at the back table. Oh!
This photo resembles everything that was wrong with the Dutch team in 1996. I was reading through a newspaper article that looked back on our (mis)adventures on previous Euro and World Cups and this was given a lot of attention. As far as I understood it wasn’t a matter of racism that was going on, merely that there was a group of players within the group of players. The players of the smaller group were unhappy and frustrated about earning less wages than the others. Mind you, this had nothing to do with the Dutch national team, but problems they brought with them from their clubs. The point is, things weren’t talked about until too late. Tempers frayed, things were said and it went so far that one of the players was sent home by the coach.
Reading through the newspaper article, I recognized the situation. I was sharply reminded of a recent event in my own life. I’ve made an extensive post about that already, so I won’t go into that again. The point being though, situations will never get better if people let their frustrations build up. There will come a point where the volcano blows, so to speak. In my not so humble opinion it’s a lot better to talk to each other well before that point is reached.
I’m only one faction away from my 35 exalted reputations and 25 tabards achievements. And, yes, I know… it’s a little slack of me that I still don’t have these achievements.
As I was browsing through my reputations list to pick a faction to focus on, I settled on the Consortium. I’m only honoured with them, but it’s one of those factions where I can just settle down for a few hours and mindlessly kill Ethereals in Netherstorm to collect Zaxxis Insignia’s.
I need another 25185 reputation to Exalted with them. Let’s do some maths to find out how much quality time in Netherstorm I have to look forward to. I’m not sure whether I got 250 or 350 reputation per 10 Insignia’s at the moment, so let’s assume a worst-case scenario: 250. To find out how often I still need to deliver another 10 Insignia’s, I’ll divide 25185 by 250. Another 101 times apparently, that’s a total of 1010 Insignia’s to collect.
In about forty minutes, I had collected 130 insignias. Hmmm. That averages around 3,25 Insignia’s per minute. To gain another 1010, I can look forward to about 330 minutes, or five and a half hours worth of griding Ethereals in Netherstorm!
Sounds fun!?
All good things must come to an end eventually. Sometimes the good turns into the bad quite unexpectedly. Recently I got confronted with a situation like this. I must say, for me personally, everything that has happened has opened my eyes.
The mentioned situation is the disbanding of my World of Warcraft guild, Stormcrows. For quite some time I lived with the illusion I had left my guild in the capable hands of my officers. I was a little burnt out with the raiding game and decided to cut back on playing a little and favoured spending my time with my girlfriend. This doesn’t sound too weird yet, does it?
My girlfriend lives in England, while I am living in the Netherlands. Add to this that I make reasonably long days – I’m away from home from about 7am to 7pm, sometimes longer if I’m unlucky. Leaving home that early means getting up early, which means going to bed reasonably early in the evenings to ensure being well rested the next day. Basically this leaves me about two, two and a half, hours with free time to spend as I see fit.
This whole situation means that, to me, every little moment spent with my girlfriend is a treasure. We don’t get to see each other much and we’ll have to make do with whatever means of communication the Internet offers us.
Apparently the people who I considered my friends thought differently. I discovered that in the months that have gone by they had been gossiping amongst themselves and expressing their displeasure with the situation. I guess, with the power of hindsight, they had a point. However, in all their self righteous wisdom they decided they wouldn’t tell me or my girlfriend about their frustrations, in fear of the “consequences”.
Needless to say I was quite upset when I found that feelings and frustrations over this had been building up over months without anyone telling us. God forbid if you actually talk to someone! I refused to take blame for their frustrations towards me. What did they expect? I can’t read other people’s minds. I blame it on them for not coming to me at an earlier stage.
I mean, only recently, in March, we had a guild meeting. Everyone involved in this was present. If the feelings of resentment and frustrations truly existed for as long as claimed, why is it that nobody spoke up? Why pretend everything is fine and dandy when you have the opportunity to speak face-to-face and avoid misunderstandings?
Back to the topic, I refused to take the sole blame on me. I still refuse to. I can see how both sides might have acted incorrectly, but I’m not going to budge and pretend I was wrong and they were right. Drama ensued as people mistakenly took this for indifference to the situation. Tempers frayed, things were said, people decided on the spot to leave. They claimed that my reaction is exactly what they feared, while my reaction was only fuelled by the way they had gone behind my back for months.
What I find well and truly disgusting is seeing roughly fifteen people turn their backs on me, half of which I considered close friends, without so much as a word. They didn’t even have the courage to tell me in my face and opted for leaving instead and indirectly placing the blame on me. Even someone I have known for well over twenty years turned around and left without a word.
I have lost all respect for these people. I can no longer see how I ever considered them as friends. That’s what you do to friends, yes? You don’t talk to them when something is wrong, you just turn your back and leave. Obviously.
As icing on the cake, some of these people who left without so much as a glance over their shoulder dared to approach me. While the words were different, they were all along the same lines telling me how they hoped I didn’t have hard feelings towards them. Excuse me?! Talking behind my back for months and leaving without a word and I’m supposed not to have hard feelings towards them?! Wow.
How does one handle a situation like this? Truth be told, I don’t know. I tried to ignore most of it. I’ve been icily courteous to others, being very careful not to voice my opinion of what they had just done. Preferably I’d rather not have anything to do with most of them ever again. I wish them the best of luck in their lives, but I ask they leave me out of it. You left me, don’t even think of coming back to me and pretend nothing happened.
The best part of The Geek’s Weekly so far is that, in fact, it’s not been very weekly! Perhaps I should rename this to The Geek’s Not-So-Weekly; I will have to ponder on this.
The second Geek’s Weekly is entirely my girlfriends fault. Yes it is, honey!
We have been farming Anzu for months, in hopes of getting Reins of the Raven Lord for our characters. She has been pestering me about it ever since I faction changed my Night Elf Druid to the Horde. I settled down to level to 80 and do the epic flight form quests, so that I could summon Anzu for her. In the same time she leveled her own Druid as well.
Anzu first dropped for her Druid. Lucky her! Amazingly enough, the following day Anzu dropped again for us! So we had achieved our initial goal, except she had not on one, but two Raven Lords now! I couldn’t believe her luck! Since then we’ve continued the farming, hoping to get another one to drop for me. I had given up hope, surely she had used up all luck already! But, last night we had another drop! Yay! I had been a little grumpy all evening and initially I didn’t feel like doing anything, but I’m very happy we made the trip to Sethekk Halls anyway!
Seeing me all cheered up, she suggested posting this as my Geek’s Weekly. I quickly agreed and asked her to pose together with me for a screenshot to accompany the post.
Our next goal is to get yet another Anzu drop. This time for my very own Druid. It would be nice to get him a Blue-Black-Birdie as well! It might require a lot of additional luck, but it’ll probably drop before we ever get to see the Tiger from Zul’Gurub! As an example to demonstrate how long we’ve been after the Zul’Gurub tiger I will tell you that in the same period we have gotten the drops for:
- Three(!) Anzu’s from Sethekk Halls,
- Two raptor mounts from Zul’Gurub,
- One white chicken mount, two phoenix hatchling pets and two orbs of the sin’dorei from Magister’s Terrace.
Grrrr!