Said that yesterday. Felt like an honest realization. Here’s the situation.
We have an intern. He’s a good kid. He likes to play basketball. We play a couple of times a week. There is a basketball tourney at work. 10 person rosters. He’s on our team.
Last week, talking to another intern that we wanted on our team, but got picked up by another team (who also is a good kid, likes to play basketball, we play a couple of times a week) I asked him if he needed a team to join for the tourney. He told me he’s got an intern team.
And that our intern is on it.
Confronting our intern about this conflict of interest, he said when our teams play each other, he’ll play on our team. Ricky Rubio might have to sit out because he’ll owe 8 million to his current team when drafted by the NBA, but he won’t get paid enough by the NBA to buy out his existing contract. Sorta completely unrelated, but leads me to believe that playing for two teams is a complicated situation and the player often has to suffer somehow.
Now, I know in my heart, that our intern just wants to play more basketball.
But I still want to kick him off the team. Not exactly sure why cause when I say the reasons out loud, they don’t really make that much sense. But still, I get these feelings/emotions so rarely, that I figure I need to take advantage of them. I feel there’s a lack of loyalty. That he should have asked first instead of just joined tems willy-nilly. He’s a young asian man – he should respect his elders.
In fact, it’s clear that when the two teams play each other, we don’t want him – we want him on the other team to crush him.
It is just a matter of whether we want him on our team for the other games.
Talking to others on the team, it is mixed. Some agree, that the intern is dead to us, others think this is completely silly and then there are the fence sitters with no opinion. They’re probably right. But also more boring. The intern’s skills won’t make or break the team. In fact, the easiest way for me to pitch dropping him from the team is that it would increase everyone else’s playing time…so maybe if I went about his “transfer” between teams that way it’d go over smoother politically. But where would the fun be in that?
The fun is in the poll…
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Okay, not going to lie, dropping him to pick up the 5’10” ad solutions gal is tempting. 😛
But I went with the first option. I think it’s mostly a matter of perspective and not knowing any better. We all care a lot about the Sports team and thus take it very personally when someone does something we perceive to hurt it. I don’t think the intern feels that same depth of a connection to the group, in the sense that we may be more like just another subset of the company that he interacts with, similar to his ties to the intern program. If the interns wouldn’t care if he joined a team (which I’m sure they wouldn’t), then why should we?
So he might not see the difference because he doesn’t feel that inclusiveness of the team that we all do, he doesn’t yet see the Sports team as more than just a group of people who work together, and I don’t think that kicking him off of our basketball team will help that. I’d think we’d want to especially demonstrate that we really do think he’s part of the group, which is why we think he ought to be on our team and why we wouldn’t kick him out for not knowing any better. Maybe that’s just me, though — I tend to be more forgiving and I also remember how different working for Y! Sports looked from the outside (while I was interviewing, for instance) compared to now.
His punishment will be having to play with the interns as we destroy them, because we’re a *team*. Also because you can push them around in the low post, but the whole *team* thing is pretty important, too. 😛
Or you can extract a free turnover from him every time we play pickup for his disloyalty.
well, this is his second internship…
but your team argument is a good one.
digesting…
as a rebuttal to sean’s argument, we could be the nicest people in the world to him and go out of our way to make him feel a part of the team and, in the end–years later, still not be able to bum a ride to the hotel down the street . . .