English
Sadly, I am not making this up; if you want to check and see just do a search for “Hampster Article”.
Would you consider defying your boss if they came to you with a bit of constructive criticism about how you could do your job better? No one I know would actually do that, even though the thought might cross their mind. The young lady in question had a bad reaction to her editor pointing out that a word had been spelled wrong in work that she submitted. It was the impossibly difficult word, “hamster”. So, it really wasn’t constructive criticism. The young lady had made an obvious mistake that was being corrected before she suffered the embarrassment of anyone else seeing her work.
This run-of-the-mill exchange between employee and employer didn’t take long to escalate from murmured whispers to outside voices. A flabbergasted employee in that office couldn’t believe her ears and tweeted what she was hearing.
The young lady who misspelled hamster couldn’t understand why she was being corrected for spelling hamster with a “P” and said as much to her boss. The editor offered to go to dictionary.com so they could look the word up together, and to that the young lady told her that inserting the P is how she wanted to spell it.
The drama didn’t stop there. The young lady sent a text to her mother who called the daughter immediately. Weeping into the phone the young lady told her mother how her editor had criticized work that she believed to be perfect and told her that she had misspelled words that she knew to be correct because she had always spelled them that way. The mother’s reply was even more shocking. She said that the boss was an idiot and that the daughter should approach someone at the next level of management to lodge a complaint against the editor for not allowing creativity in her writing.
I have not seen this level of coddling in my lifetime of working with college-bound students, but some have approached this threshold. Parents, the things you do for your child to support their self-esteem are good… to a point. When they reach the level of stroking an ego that causes your child to develop a superior attitude, you have gone too far. Someone will bring them down a notch if you don’t. And remember, those other people don’t love them like you do.
