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Tutor Trouble? My friend and I got into a fight with him?

Asked by SassyPink (284points) March 10th, 2012

—Pardon my grammar. Sometimes it is hard to concentrate or think straight when you’re angry. Just writing about this incident makes me upset. ><
Plus it’s a long story, so I also apologized for that one too…. :/—

Yesterday my friend and I got into a fight with a lab tutor, verbally. This incident took place inside the chemistry computer lab/ study room. So we were both working on our lab reports that needed to be turned in later that evening. (About my lab partner, she’s both extremely shy and quiet but she can be very generous and funny. I used to be very shy like that too back in grade school, but I’m mostly over that now since I started to become more socialize and such like now. Anyways, back to the story.) We were both very busy with our papers and started talking to each other a lot. About an hour later, a professor was getting ready to lock the room up and then made everyone in the lab leave. We didn’t happen to hear him at first because we were both still talking. (In retrospect, that part was kind of our fault but it’s not like we meant to do it on purpose. The professor‘s voice was a little quiet at first and our talking kind of drained out the noise.) Then the professor finally caught our attention and informed us that he’d already made an announcement to leave. We both listened to him and told him “okay” and decided to save our process and take it somewhere else (to the library). Since then we didn’t really see the professor around anymore. My guess was that he was either waiting outside to lock the door or that he gave the keys to one of the tutors and left.

On my computer, I already had my school email account opened from earlier, so I’ve managed to save my stuff on time and packed the rest of my things away. I was just waiting for her to do the very same thing. Moments later, while I was waiting for my friend to start emailing herself, this one tutor came to check on us and said to my friend “you seriously cannot be emailing right now miss.” We both apologized to him about that and told him that we were almost done. (I even tried to crack a little lighthearted joke with him that my friend’s slow and that she didn’t mean to cause this hold up.) He informed us that the professor needed to leave because he has a class to teach (That part we didn’t know.) Once again I apologized and told him that we’ll be leaving asap. I even nudged my friend to hurry up while this tutor was still standing on our necks. She was behaving a little irresponsive and I can sense her feeling a bit nervous at the moment to leave too while this tutor was standing on our necks. (I understand why he has to do that because he was waiting for us to leave). By the time she was finally done with the computer after a few seconds later, this tutor started flipping out about us while he was talking to someone else from far. He started to raise his voice about my friend (while jumping into all sorts of conclusions about us) and said “This f****** chick just ignores the professor and refuses to leave.” He just assumes that we purposely ignored the professor’s instructions, which was never honestly the case in the first place.

At first I didn’t want to say anything, just kept quiet and I’m usually try to be polite with many faculties on campus, but the way he talked about my friend like that offends me and that’s where I started to defend her. I begin raising my voiced at him in response to his attitude starting with “Whoa, what is your problem? We said we’re gonna leave…etc” (I didn’t shout at him btw, I was just talking to him normally with a little raised voice.) My friend also joined in the heated argument briefly and to reassure him that she is already done with the computer before he made that remark. Now she and I do really feel bad about causing a hold up, but at the moment, I really don’t appreciate the way he talked about her in such manner especially with her being quiet, sensitive, and somewhat defenseless. Then we had gotten a little back and forth argument which resulted to even more misunderstanding.

At the time I wish that I could’ve said more to him in response such as “Just because we caused a problem and accidentally made the professor late, you think it is okay to go ape*** on us and then referred to her as This F***** Chick? ” , but instead we just stormed the other way and said nothing. Beside, arguing with him more would’ve just made me angrier to the point where I could just kick his *** in a heartbeat and I‘m glad that I didn‘t resort to doing that for obvious reasons.

I need some advice please… was this bad on my part? Or did I do the right thing?

P.S. Since this incident happened, my friend was thinking of reporting it to the dean in charge of the department or go to the campus’s counselor about it. But she was kind of scared of the consequences. We were also thinking of apologizing to that professor for making him late if we ever had the chance to see him, but not to the tutor.

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