I never understood popularity contests. It may be because I was never popular when I was in school, but I fail to see the point in wanting everybody to like you. That means they might want to touch you, and I find that disturbing and gross. I don’t see anything wrong with having people like you for who you are. That is a natural thing. It’s not like I walk around hoping that people despise me. However, I do have the reputation of being mean, which is a different thing altogether.

When I worked at Remus College, Townsend and I contended with a faculty member, Murdoch, who was dead set on being the most popular person in the department. However, if you asked students who they liked the most, the ranking would go Townsend, Me, Mason, and Murdoch. The rest of us didn’t try to win over our students. They just liked us. I wasn’t trying to earn any brownie points with the students. I simply talked to them like they were adults. I tinged my conversations with them in biting sarcasm and mild insults, but for some odd reason, they seemed to like that. I suppose even negative attention can be beneficial for some people.

Murdoch was a tryhard, meaning she would go out of her way to try to win the students’ favor. At one point in a department meeting, she started screaming at Townsend over the fact that students liked her more. Murdoch wanted to know why the students preferred Townsend over her. All Townsend said was that she treated the students with respect and didn’t belittle the other faculty members in front of them. I think this little remark enraged Murdoch because she knew she was guilty of both of those things. Murdoch was well-known as a huge trash talker about her department colleagues, especially Townsend. Maybe it is just me, but I thought the goal of a class is to impart knowledge about a specific topic, not your personal tastes about the people you work with.

After that conversation, Murdoch made it a point to make Townsend’s life miserable at Remus. I won’t give away the details here as I have them documented in the second book I am writing about Remus College, but I will say that she took some extreme measures. The problems became so severe that campus security had to issue a no-contact order between the two.

The comedy in this police paperwork is two-fold. First, these two people work in the same building where there are few permanent walls to separate them. Second, Murdoch instigated the order because she believed Townsend ripped down a cubicle wall as a threat. Since she panicked and called security, thinking that this would get Townsend in trouble, she got slapped with a restraining order to stay away from her coworker.

I honestly don’t know how those two managed to work in the same building, but they did. I guess it wasn’t too hard considering that Murdoch rarely came on campus, even to teach her classes. I find it funny the lengths that some people will go to make others look bad because they have this yearning to be recognized and respected. Sometimes it gets the police involved and makes your own life more difficult. The lesson here is that sometimes it’s not worth the effort to have a student or two think you’re not a complete jerk.