Sense of Entitlement

Entitlement - To give right or claim to.
This summer has been a major eye opener. I have learned many things both about myself and others, but there is a one thing that has been bothering me these past few weeks.  In the post before this one (Growing Up) I spoke about my experience working at a summer camp this summer and in this post I am going to continue following with this idea.

The one thing that kept coming up while I was in the camp for those two weeks was the sense of entitlement that every staff member just seemed to have.  I don't understand why every person on staff thought that they had rights to everything in camp. My job was to print t-shirts for the camp, from the time that I got there I had over 300 camper t-shirts to print, over 200 staff shirts, plus an additional 150 staff sweatshirts and for the older kids in camp another 100 sweatshirts to print. Now considering each of these shirts have a front and back meaning they have to be printed twice because you can only do one side at a time the numbers are double; making it 600 camper shirts, 400 staff shirts, 450 staff sweatshirts (they had a front, back and sleeve) and 200 sweatshirts. Two weeks to print 1,650 shirts seems like a lot of time, but there are other things that have to get done in order to make these shirts happen.

I get asked all the time, "how long does it take to make a shirt?" Well there are a few answers to this question, A. 5 minutes is the screen is made and on the press ready to go. B. 10 minutes if the screen is made and not up on the press ready to go. C. 6 hours if the screen is not burned (made) yet. D. 48 hours if there is no screen on the drying rack waiting to be burned.

The only answer anyone ever hears is A and so the comment that always follows is "so if it only takes 5 minutes to make a shirt can I just give you a shirt to print on?"  I am pretty sure that no one ever thinks maybe EVERY PERSON on staff has made this request! And just because you are on staff does not mean that I have to do it for you.  What bothered me most was when staff would show up in the silk-screening room and ask to see what I'm working on, and then proceed to ask if there were any shirts laying around that they could just print something on, or they would bring a shirt that they had gotten and demand a new one because a mistake was made on theirs (things like the ink running together or wearing off).  I felt bad for them, but there really is nothing that I can do for them.

Off the topic of what I did in camp, there was one night at a staff meeting where the heads of the camp announced that there would be a curfew for the staff. Everyone was out raged, but from the short time that I had been in camp I noticed that this was a necessary measure.  Alas that night when I was heading back to bed at 3 am (curfew was at 1:30am) I noticed many staff members hanging out outside the bunks.  They felt that they were above the rules (with my position in camp curfew was over looked for me) but then in the morning not a single one of them was able to wake up for work, clearly this was a necessary measure! It seems that people just need to learn to grow up and get over the feeling that they are entitled to everything because this is not the way to get through life.