The Chain Link Effect

I might have been a little harsh last post, so let me explain why I sound so frustrated. This is a warning tale, something I hope members and officers alike can learn from. The point is protecting relationships, and it happened middle of 2008.

When a situation begins to spiral, a chain of events occur. People are links in the chain, and some are helpless after their role. Others are not. But any link can break the chain when it gets to them.

Link 1: Me
Link 2: Applicant
Link 3: Henry*
Link 4: Mora*
Link 5: Officer A
Link 6: Officers B & C
Link 7: Guild Leader**

*Names changed.
**So you don't get confused, this is the non-Teo GL, a very good friend who served most of 2008.

The chain began when I rejected Applicant, Henry's real life friend.

I was tired, overworked, and didn't love his app. He left the "Did you read our rules?" blank, I'd posted on the website "Blank answers equal auto-no," and even though I would have overlooked it if it'd been a different question left blank or he'd been better connected . . . he wasn't. Henry was brother-in-law to Officer A but very new to the guild and neither he nor his wife had pushed to get to know us at that point. Henry also didn't leave a recommendation for Applicant that I found . . . well, sufficient. It was more of an acknowledgment that they knew each other than a recommendation to the guild.

So I gave Applicant a chance to fill in the two empty questions.

At the end of three days with no reply, I sent him a rejection notice and told him he could try again.

(The same week, I auto-rejected a second real life friend of Henry's, a kid who hadn't filled out even half of the required fields, including how he knew Henry. Had I left the application up long enough for Henry to recommend, I might have given that kid the option to reapply as I had the other friend. He's a lesser detail in the story and not a link in the chain.)

Henry spoke to me and understood my reasoning for rejecting both.

Applicant spoke to me and tried to talk his way into the guild by answering the questions directly. "Yes, I read the rules," he said. During the conversation, I explained and assumed he understood that he'd have to fill out another application and our chat wouldn't change that fact.

I lost little love for him in our conversation because he said several times that he had no time to play the game and became petulant when I suggested Jame's Leveling Guide ("If you don't want me in your guild just say so"), a guide which I myself find very useful to maximize game time. From his conversation, I believed that he thought other people helping him level was the fastest way to go. Ignoring the fact that he was completely mistaken, that level of neediness was exactly the kind of thing I tried to protect IVV from.

At this point, from a normal guild point of view, you might say "I wouldn't even have let him reapply! Geez, suck it up Applicant, QQ." While I find this mode of thought comforting for my own part, it is not the way we do things in a family guild. We give second chances, and we don't resent giving them.

The problem was that he turned down his second chance to get in the guild, citing no time to fill out a second application. It might have ended with that, but Henry was compelled (whether through his own will or Applicant's badgering, I don't know) to gquit in order to play with Applicant and rejected kid.

This also might not have been a problem if Henry had not left a wife behind in the guild. Mora.

Mora, of course, is the link after Henry. She could have handled the situation by grabbing her husband by his virtual short hairs and tearing into him the way only a wife can.

Instead, she went to her brother, Officer A, in a frenzy of worry about having to follow her husband out of the guild. While brothers are reasonable and acceptable sources of comfort (I've always leaned on Jon), her going to him instead of her husband put him in the middle of a marital issue, where he could (at best) be only a mediator. Were there reasons for high levels of turmoil on Mora's part? Yes. Henry did not live at home -- a soldier, he was stationed away from his wife and kids with the cheerful prospect of being deployed in Iraq in the foreseeable future. Mora was taking care of their children by herself and very stressed. (Knowing this made me angrier at Henry. You do not leave your single mom wife stranded in a guild so you can play with an army buddy.)

But was this an excuse for dragging her brother into it? No. She was a grown woman. A good explanation is not a good excuse.

Her panic reacted sharply off of Officer A, who did not want to leave IVV but saw no choice if his sister left. While he is the last person I want to blame for any part in the situation, as he is more a victim than the rest of us at this point in the story, his stress and confusion did more damage than Mora's, as he was a vital guild asset and very good friend.

Still, had he approached the situation from a "We can get her back in the guild when things calm down" point rather than believing he had to go with her (and could never come back), his worry might not have fused him to the next link:

Officers B and C. They were the only others online when all of this went down and, like Officer A, they got swept up in the panic and pressure of the situation. I was told afterward that they did the right thing at the time, and I believed it. But now . . . no. There was no excuse for bending to the will of people blinded by fear, except that they were blinded themselves. No one considered that we could work out the situation and get them back even if Officer A left.

They, in a joint decision, brought everyone back in the guild. Henry, Applicant, and the kid who hadn't even filled out his application. They even promised to accept another of Henry's friends without his having to apply when he got the game.

Since, at the time, I considered myself to have more authority over applications than I actually possessed, this stripped not only that imagined authority from me but the little I actually did possess. It hurt my pride, it denuded my job to a paperwork monkey, and it completely infuriated me. Moreso because Applicant had been arrogant and even a little patronizing to me, and because the kid wasn't even a part of the issue and his application was so incomplete, it didn't exist.

But they still got guild invites.

It was an emergency action to protect Officer A though part was, I truly believe, because men don't know how to deal with hysterical women.

(You slap them. For reference. And I'm not being mean -- I truly believe a good verbal wake-up call is necessary for anyone too scared to see clearly, especially if their actions are harming or frightening the people around them.)

But the problem wasn't just that I was angry, though angry is a pale reference to my helpless, insulted rage. It was that I never got to resolve the issue. Because everyone took the easy way out, the way that was most obvious to them without thinking about the consequences or negative effects it would have on other people, I got left holding a fury I could do nothing about. I couldn't even talk to any of the first few links, because I wasn't sure I could be civil. And, really, what was there to talk about? "I'm furious and only barely managing to keep from gkicking your friends and gquitting in a petulant childish huff"?

Yeah. Real mature.

The final link sealed the situation into a ball of unapproachable, unresolved issue: The guild leader tried to calm everyone down. He affirmed everyone's actions as correct, when everyone's actions were completely wrong. The only excuse I can offer him is that he didn't see the whole situation as the chain it was, just as I didn't, and wanted everyone to be happy again.

One of Teo's recent posts mentions that it's bad to assign no blame if blame is needed. In that situation, everyone was to blame and no one was blamed. For me, it was personal. For them, it was disaster averted. At different points, I was mad at each individual link in the chain without understanding the overall effect of everyone's bad decisions. And it was easy to talk me down from wanting to gkick and claw eyes out because I don't like being angry at people I care about. I ended up thinking "Well, I could have avoided this by letting the patronizing jerk into the guild in the first place." Like it was all my fault, since I didn't want to blame my friends or Officer A's sister or a man who was about to be deployed to Iraq.

I ended up deciding it was the applicants' faults. I didn't want them in my guild, they shouldn't have gotten in that way, and the kid turned out to be a needy, greedy brat who gquit a week later with the statement "nobody ever helps me" -- and who afterward badmouthed us to other guilds. (Think of all the badmouthing he'd have added if he'd known the wild, triumphant cheer I let out when he left. XD It was one of the most joyful moments of my officer career, just as good as a well-placed "I told you so.")

The older Applicant stopped playing shortly after joining, a fact I'm relieved about even now. I don't think I could have hidden my dislike, and I don't like confrontation.

I'm not sure what moral I should attach here. I think there are a few, like "Think before you act," but it's all a bunch of cliches.

Your intentions can be unquestionable, your motives sympathetic, and your position defensible -- but your actions can still make everything worse. In these situations, it takes multiple people to flush everything into a headlong spiral and wrap it all off with a nice unresolved bow.

It takes just one to stop it. Any one link, at the time they were called to make a decision, could have done something differently. I could have talked to Henry before rejecting his friend and found out it was a gquit issue. Applicant could have accepted my offer to reapply. Henry could have stayed in the guild and still played with his friends. Mora could have unleashed her freakout on her husband instead of her brother. Officer A could have told his sister to sit tight and calm down until the officers could mediate. Officers B and C could have done the same. And the guild leader could have called everyone to account.

Eight people can make quite a mess. One link, acting wisely, could have cleaned it up.

The fact that no one had the foresight to do so is an excuse to some extent, but it still doesn't make up for damaged relationships. The situation was full of Accommodating when it should have been handled with Collaborating. Accommodating is good when something doesn't matter, but it mattered to me. Collaborating is much slower but could have gotten everyone out with their relationships intact.

And that is the point. My relationships were damaged. Wounded. Scarred. It's been months. I'm not holding grudges as much as acknowledging that my feelings about people changed because they made selfish decisions (Applicant, Henry, and Mora particularly -- though this event does not permit anyone, including me, to make judgments on their marriage, they obviously had no communication about this and it yanked all of the officers into their problem).

If there is a way to preserve relationships, you must fight for it with all your strength. I tried. I really tried. Not coherently, and perhaps that's why I failed, and perhaps because no one realized that this would leave a permanent mark not just on my pride but on my relationships. But the truth is, if the other officers had not Accommodated, we could have come to a decision that let me look even Applicant in the eye with some level of respect.

While my guild has changed since then, and policy would not allow the same thing to happen today, I still feel it vital to press this thought on you, the reader:

Relationships must be preserved and protected.

And that is what I want to convince you of today. Not "Oh, woe is me, everyone was mean and I'm such a victim." Yes, I realize I'm still angry and I need to get over myself. I also realize I've been pretty snarky in this post and it could hurt feelings. My only defense is . . . I've been honest.

But my goal is to convince you of the simple idea that you need to be aware when relationships are in danger so that you can work to protect them.

I'm not saying it's easy, but I am saying it's necessary.

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Beth Blevins is a former officer in In Vino Veritas.

She's a writer, artist and avid blogger.

Beth's been married since her junior year of college.