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GeekNights Tuesday - Why Nobody can Find a Gaming Group

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  • I remember seeing him with a different group later on.

    Perhaps he found Those Guys, and became their king - The Guy.

    A bittersweet finale, but closure nonetheless.
  • I remember seeing him with a different group later on.

    Perhaps he found Those Guys, and became their king - The Guy.

    A bittersweet finale, but closure nonetheless.
    Or it was yet another group of victims.
  • edited March 2013
    I remember in Jr. High there was, at one point, where my group of friends and I basically had the "we're going to have to let you go" with some guy that had weaseled his way into our social circle.
    Post edited by MATATAT on
  • That's one surprising typo I've always been prone to when typing distractedly. I type "queue" so often in my daily life that it's second nature to always type it.
    A problem I would also likely be prone to if I used the other queue ever.
  • I've met a "that guy," except it was, rather, "that girl" while in the dormitories in undergrad. She wasn't a geek by any means, just extremely socially awkward. She'd cling to you as if you were the only light she had seen in eons, following you wherever you went, desperately trying to prove she liked the same things you liked. She came over quite frequently of her own volition and just sat in my room... staring... while I continued my own independent perusing of the internet.
    Although I can admit, there have been times when I think I have come close to being "that guy/girl," with my own overly happy and hyperactive nature contributing to great degrees. You like Pokemon? Wellll let me tell you about my Adamant EV-trained Dragonite and how long it took to breed Weavile with Ice Punch and do you want to have a Pokemon battle I have starters I can trade... So on and so forth. I try to calm that shit down.
  • I've met a "that guy," except it was, rather, "that girl" while in the dormitories in undergrad. She wasn't a geek by any means, just extremely socially awkward. She'd cling to you as if you were the only light she had seen in eons, following you wherever you went, desperately trying to prove she liked the same things you liked. She came over quite frequently of her own volition and just sat in my room... staring... while I continued my own independent perusing of the internet.
    Although I can admit, there have been times when I think I have come close to being "that guy/girl," with my own overly happy and hyperactive nature contributing to great degrees. You like Pokemon? Wellll let me tell you about my Adamant EV-trained Dragonite and how long it took to breed Weavile with Ice Punch and do you want to have a Pokemon battle I have starters I can trade... So on and so forth. I try to calm that shit down.
    DRAGONITE IS BEST
  • Great write-up.
    FYI, when Rym says "we" in that toomble, he means "Pete."
    Props for that.

    I'm curious as to what dynamic or group of dynamics caused the group to take so (seemingly) long to reject That Guy? Seems like the situation just boiled-over, but, prior to that, what kind of discussions took place, and what mistakes (if any) do you think you made as a group that you wouldn't make next time?

    Also, would you say you were able to control the damage and simultaneously say no? Would it even be advisable to try to do damage-control in that kind of situation?

    I ask this because throughout my freshman year in college this dude followed me around all the time and I couldn't shake him. He would say brash and inappropriate things loudly in public all the time and had no regard for secrets or privacy. I never shook him off and the only thing that got him away from me was that I transfered to another school and moved out of town.

    I was too nice for too long. Looking back, I feel that not telling him "no" was wrong of me. Further, I haven't really run into (or have at least successfully avoided) people like that in a long time, and am not sure how I'd handle it myself, or how I should.

    In the episode you guys seem to present strategies of avoidance, like saying the group is full for instance, or that you've canceled and then rescheduling... These are well and good, but how do you permanently squelch the problem person? Murder not included.
  • In some cases I think the establishment helps prevent the formation of "that guy." During my clinicals as a nursing student, there was a "that guy" of such strong awkwardness and inappropriate behavior that our instructors failed her without actual reason. Our clinicals were pass-fail and, mostly, at the whim of your instructor. "If you won't make a good nurse," they told us, "we won't let you through."
    This person would walk up to physicians in the hospital and tell dirty jokes and speak inappropriate phrases. "Hey, when you were with that patient and you were doing a breast exam, did that just turn you on?"
    She also brought her two-year-old to microbiology lab where we were growing samples of MRSA and other potentially semi-dangerous bacteria so I guess that speaks volumes.
  • Great write-up. I'm curious as to what dynamic or group of dynamics caused the group to take so (seemingly) long to reject That Guy? Seems like the situation just boiled-over, but, prior to that, what kind of discussions took place, and what mistakes (if any) do you think you made as a group that you wouldn't make next time?... These are well and good, but how do you permanently squelch the problem person? Murder not included.
    So what do you say? There's no non-cruel "popular kid" way to ask someone not to sit with you at the campus cafeteria...

    "You make us uncomfortable" similarly leads to the same sort of blowup, even at an early stage. "We find you boorish." "We don't think you work out as our friend."

    "Could you please not talk about violent animated pornography around us?" was tried, but had no effect. Even if it had, we still didn't really want the dude around.

    Social cues have zero effect. Even fairly direct and hostile ones fall on deaf ears.



  • Also cues not queues.
    Oops. ;^)

    That's one surprising typo I've always been prone to when typing distractedly. I type "queue" so often in my daily life that it's second nature to always type it.

    A mistake I will easily forgive on account of I'll make that same mistake a few thousand more times.
  • Of course, it's all easier now. I live in New York. I'm honestly busy all the time, so I basically only ever see or interact with people I want to see or interact with, and even then most of them less often than I would like.

    That guy has no way to actually appear at anything I do anymore, let alone actually affect me. At a convention, I really am in a hurry regardless of who it is. ;^)
  • edited March 2013
    everyone has been talking about "that guy" in a social setting, so how about a professional one? Has anyone ever had to deal with an office "that guy"?

    I worked in a call center once with a fellow who was absolutely obsessed with baseball and would talk about it constantly, even if you asked him to stop. The fellow also emitted a low level but constant reek. Not body odor precisely, more of a fresh cow manure aroma. He made life miserable for everyone who couldn't avoid him (myself included) for better than two years. In the end his abhorrent lack of hygiene got him canned.
    Post edited by Drunken Butler on
  • edited March 2013
    This thread is always making me remember more random stories.

    I feel like I'm just "that guy" enough to communicate a little better with "that guy" than most people can. I can reach in deeper and hit some nerves on a case by case basis. It is not a pleasant experience for either party involved though when it's done. I remember an incident where someone was behaving in a way everybody else found reprehensible and rather than confronting him about that directly or acting any particular way in reaction to it, I was completely deadpan and started quizing him on what he was doing. "Why are you talking about this? What reaction were you expecting out of people? Why did you want that reaction?" Maybe this guy wasn't so bad deep-down, eventually the questions forced him to think about the situation. At some point he actually realized what his own core motive was and it blew up in his face.

    That's possibly a big part of the problem for a lot of people. I know it was for me if you look at a younger and younger version of me. If you don't know why you yourself are doing a thing, it's much harder to extrapolate why other people behave how they behave.

    You have to know that which comes before. >_<
    Post edited by Anthony Heman on
  • We had a "that guy" a work. We nicknamed him 'professor' and he thought it was a compliment.
  • edited March 2013
    everyone has been talking about "that guy" in a social setting, so how about a professional one? Has anyone ever had to deal with an office "that guy"?
    Oh gods, where to start...

    Here, have a very recent example:

    So we were packing up the lab. The entire damn lab. We'd stopped sampling for 2 weeks to get it done. Three of us had been packing for three straight days - we'd emptied our entire bench, shut down nearly all of our equipment. We've got 8 incubators and 5 large refrigerators, all of which needed to be shut down and decontaminated before being moved. It was a huge amount of work.

    Four days in, when we had absolutely all equipment shut down and decontaminated, and no accessible testing supplies, Dr. That Guy comes waltzing into the lab.

    I want to say, just for your information, that Dr. That Guy did not help us at all during this time, or any time after. In fact, he wasn't in the lab for those days. In fact, he's rarely in the lab. I rarely see him do anything. Nobody actually knows what he does.

    So there we are, it's Thursday and we're shut the fuck down. Non-operational. At this point, it'd take days for us to get back up to full operating capacity. Dr. That Guy has been busy all week doing...nothing.

    Dr. That Guy: "Hey [coworker], I just looked at your latest gel; it's probably fine, but if you redo it, there's a chance it could come out better. Since we don't have any samples, why don't you go ahead and pull out cultures today, make plugs tomorrow, and run them Monday?"

    In layman's terms: "Oh, I see you just finished doing a shitload of work. How about you undo absolutely all of it to do something irrelevant, and I'll sit at my desk and not do anything to help? Oh, and have fun cleaning the lab!"

    Fuck that guy.

    Post edited by TheWhaleShark on
  • I've interviewed that guy before.

    I will not pretend that that guy's that guy-ness was not a factor in my evaluation.
  • edited March 2013
    I was definitely the "Pete" in my high school friend group that would end up teling people to stop hanging out with us. My usual line was something like "Hey, we don't like the way you're acting and it's causing [x] problems, so stop acting that way or else we don't really want to hang out with you anymore." That's pretty much the most civil way I could ever figure out to do it. Usually they got mad and left us alone, in one instance they actually adjusted their behavior and it got better, though we still limited out time with them a bit.

    It got easier with time though, since my friend group eventually figured out how to cut people off immediately at the first sign of thatguyness.
    Post edited by Sail on
  • Personality is absolutely a critical factor to consider when putting someone into a workplace - doubly so if they're in a team environment. Clashing personalities cause morale to suffer, which increases turnover, which increases your cost to employ. If someone is obviously not well-suited to the environment in which you are looking to place them, why place them?

    It may be different if you effectively work in a cave, devoid of human contact - but even then, if you're hiring that person, they still have to work with you. You will have to encounter them at some point.
  • edited March 2013
    I used to share an office with a guy who was my senior and he used to drive us all up the wall.

    For a start he had a thick accent... we couldn't understand him. I've worked with guys from Botswana, Ghana, Australia, New York, India and I've never had a problem. This guy was from Bradford, not even 10 miles away and no one could understand him!

    He used to lecture me about things I didn't know and the value of local knowledge and yet he continued to fuck things up. We had a cafeteria cabin on our construction site and we wanted to rent it to a catering company, this idiot set up two contracts to two different catering companies for hiring the same space. We had to pay one of them off.

    Then, later, we needed to do an air leakage test on a new school we'd built to get the energy efficiency signed off... You of course do this by calculating the surface area of the building and using the air leakage data. He did not know the difference between areas and volumes and continued to insist that multiplying together all the dimensions of the building would give the surface area.

    That's pretty fundamental stuff in my line of work.

    He lost his job a few years ago. Every now and again someone will ask whatever happened to him and I'll make up a fake story about how he delivered a pizza to my place the other night or served me in the supermarket. Yeah it sounds mean but the real joke not what I said but the fact that I said it at all.
    Post edited by Totally Guy on
  • I think I was relatively "That Guy" at an interview I've mentioned before that I effectively "botched" by contemporary interview standards. Didn't want job. Found things and behaviors offensive. Could find no fucks to give.

    But controlled choice to be that guy isn't really that guy.
  • If you really want to see "That Guy" in action, work for a little while in a video game testing job. In four months I managed to find only two guys actually worth talking to, and just ignored every one else.
  • While we're talking about that guy...
  • Ever walk into a room generously filled with "that guy"s? Yeah, having tons of places to explore in the city has its downsides, too.

    That oily, dandruffy smell probably followed me out the door.
  • everyone has been talking about "that guy"

    Dr. That Guy: "Hey [coworker], I just looked at your latest gel; it's probably fine, but if you redo it, there's a chance it could come out better. Since we don't have any samples, why don't you go ahead and pull out cultures today, make plugs tomorrow, and run them Monday?"

    that sure is a Lumberg quote of the day! - go ahead and watch Office space for one of the best shit-talking management speak insights into cube farms ever!!
  • edited March 2013
    He's not even my manager. That makes it even more bizarre. He constantly over-reaches and attempts to exert authority where he has none. Hedge him off and he goes off to complain to the director. Nothing usually comes of it, thankfully - but still, it's aggravating to be around someone who constantly treats everyone else like his subordinates.

    Someone on Reddit, in a thread about Chevy Chase, summed up his personality type perfectly:

    "He sounds like one of those guys who you meet and from then on you hate. Like, the next day you're watching him eat an apple, and you're just furious, thinking to yourself, 'What an asshole. I hate the way he eats apples.'"

    He's That Guy.
    Post edited by TheWhaleShark on
  • well just say no - see what happens if he can't pick up on the subtle stuff the more direct stuff may actually work afterall you are not really interested in his arguments and wasting your energy on him. You might be able to encourage him to argue with your superiors about what he thinks their staff should be doing (a good way to jujitsu him into using his that-guy energy to fuck himself up) and become a pain in the arse to them. failing that it might be time for a new job

    or have you just got a case of THE MONDAYS :(
  • edited March 2013
    well just say no - see what happens if he can't pick up on the subtle stuff the more direct stuff may actually work afterall you are not really interested in his arguments and wasting your energy on him. You might be able to encourage him to argue with your superiors about what he thinks their staff should be doing (a good way to jujitsu him into using his that-guy energy to fuck himself up) and become a pain in the arse to them. failing that it might be time for a new job

    or have you just got a case of THE MONDAYS :(
    They have already done the direct thing. The superiors already know about him. Dr. That Guy gives zero fucks.

    Post edited by Nuri on
  • well just say no - see what happens if he can't pick up on the subtle stuff the more direct stuff may actually work afterall you are not really interested in his arguments and wasting your energy on him. You might be able to encourage him to argue with your superiors about what he thinks their staff should be doing (a good way to jujitsu him into using his that-guy energy to fuck himself up) and become a pain in the arse to them. failing that it might be time for a new job

    or have you just got a case of THE MONDAYS :(
    Oh, I say no all the time. That's not an issue. He has no bearing on my daily priority list. But I liken it to hiking through a mosquito-filled swamp - I'm not going to alter my course to avoid the mosquitos, but holy shit do I hate those fucking things.

    I once spent half an hour telling him why he's an asshole, and why nobody wants to work with him. I pointed out the offending behaviors, and offered suggestions as to how he could try to work on them.

    He is unchanged to this day.
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