I’m a staff member for an online game, a MUSH to be exact. My duties include building virtual rooms as needed, helping players with questions of all kinds, running scenes for players to participate in, and reviewing/approving characters for play. I work a full-time ‘office’ job, so I’m home and logged in every evening during the week and during most of the day and evening on weekends.
Our Head Wizard is the main reason that this MUSH exists at all. She set out to learn enough MUSHcoding to get her own MUSH up and running, and in less than two years she’s accomplished quite a lot. She also has been on more MUSHes than I have, and has deliberately set out to avoid the mistakes that she’s seen on these various places. She is able to log on from the time she wakes up until the time she goes to bed. She has 7 other staff members, including myself, but she has easily done the lion’s share of the work in actually constructing every part of this MUSH. I contributed a very tiny bit before the MUSH went into Alpha testing, and have done more since I became a staff member (which was after the start of Alpha).
The Head Wizard, to my point of view, is a go-getter. When she sees that something needs to be done, she takes care of it RIGHT AWAY. This has led, I believe, to three things:
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She sometimes complains about her staff never doing anything and she has to do everything.
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She sometimes complains that EVERYONE pages her or otherwise contacts her with every little question or problem. She has several times announced that people should contact other staff members, but the problem seems to be a recurring one.
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She sometimes complains that she is sick and/or exhausted (she has CFS) and tho she never says it in so many words, this is a direct result of her having to do everything.
The fact that everyone looks to her for answers or action and the fact that she is constantly exhausted from stressing over the MUSH all day every day is, to my mind, her own fault. It’s a situation she created, I say. The fact that staff don’t so much is because she’s already on top of it, and she’s conditioned staff to that behavior, too.
I’m ranting here because I’m getting tired of being guilt-tripped. A player was today constructing a character. Player had not submitted the character for review, nor had the player asked for help. Head Wiz, who has said repeatedly she is not good with character generation, and actually has a note telling folks not to ask her about character generation, looks over the character sheet and sees mistakes, then begins telling the player about the corrections he needs to make. Knowing she’s once again trying to do everything RIGHT NOW, I tell her to leave the player alone. Here is when I learn, for the first time, that it’s apparently my job to bug the player to make corrections to his character sheet before he’s finished constructing it. She said to me, ‘If you would do your JOB, I wouldn’t have to do it for you.’ When I point out that the player hadn’t asked for help, and may well resent being directed to make corrections before his character sheet was ready to be reviewed, I was told that the player ‘could go elsewhere if he didn’t like it’. I was told that ‘I was supposed to be helping the player’, not hanging back doing nothing.
I feel that the Head Wiz has a compulsion, a compulsion that drives her to look for things to do, even to make them up at times. I resent the implication that my viewpoint makes me a bad staff member.
This is on top of several other things that have happened lately, both with the MUSH and with Real Life. I feel out of synch with the rest of staff and especially with the Head Wiz. This has come and gone before, and in the past I’ve quit other MUSHes as a way of dealing with the problem. I don’t want to quit this time, as I feel like it would be running away and I’d just be perpetuating my own cycle of negativity. I don’t know exactly what to do about this. I guess I’ll try to wait a couple days, see if time helps me put this in perspective.