WAIT! It's not as boring as it sounds, I promise.
Well... I don't promise it won't be completely boring. But it's fun. And that's what counts.
So this morning I had a girl come by the labs around 7:10am to try and print something out.
Knock, knock. Can I come in?
"The labs aren't open until 7:30am," my co-worker and I tell her rather unapologetically since there is a sign. First mistake perhaps. She pleads with us explaining that she has a class at 7:30am and just needs to print something really quickly. Holding steadfast to the lab policies, we explain again the hours of operation. She eventually leaves though not after making a comment about how our college sucks.
"Ridiculous," I say to my co-worker, releasing a sign of exasperation, knowing that today is likely going to be one of those days. He shakes his head in reply likely feeling the same way as I do. We exchange a few jests about the lab policies and how it's just how it is. "The labs were open until midnight last night," I say with a chuckle. "Perhaps she shouldn't have put off her assignment." We both laugh and go about our business. Me? I still need to wake up.
7:25am: My coworker has busied himself by turning on the lights and wakes the computers as the rest of campus should waking themselves. Unfortunately someone has waken up "a half hour early" for the sole purpose of printing out something important before class. Five minutes before the official time to open she knocks furiously on the door demanding to be allowed entry. I lower the can of Monster from my lips and shake my head, looking towards my coworker. She sees this as a sign of defiance and proceeds to make demands of us.
"I was going to open the labs early," my co-worker tells me calmly. "Now I'm waiting until 7:30 sharp." This, of course, only serves to increase this girl's rage level to OVER 9000!! Curses fly from her mouth that would embarrass the most eloquent of swearers. When we let her in at 7:30 she storms past the desk to sit down angrily at a computer and proceeding to say how much she hates white people and how our job is easy and we are terrible at customer service; that she is somehow better than us because she works customer service at Best Buy and she is always nice; that her being a working student who happens to be middle-eastern entitles her to some sort of special consideration or treatment; that she is always nice to people and doesn't deserve this kind of treatment; and finally that "karma will get me for this." I, of course, have learned to fear the spells and curses of those who practice witchcraft. The fear of some day paying for this trickles down my spine like a drop of cold water, chilling me from head to toe. I tremble as she storms out.
Thinking that perhaps the worst is over, my co-worker and I exchange a brief glance and a collective sigh of relief. Within moments of dropping our guard the screams and shouts of an angry woman resound through the halls of the Johnson Center, condemning the school, (white) people, and most fiercely, my co-worker and I. Ten minutes of ranting leaves us rather nervous and annoyed. In my head I imagine an angered customer standing outside of McDonald's making outrageous claims about catburgers and roaches in the nuggets. True or not, might drive some people away. Not that I'm all that concerned about driving people away from the labs but I don't want rumors spreading about the techs. I do kind of need this job. After 10 minutes of this (which brings us to approximately 7:45 which makes her much later for class than she would have been without causing the scene), I decide to call the police and have them escort her to class. The kind and understanding operator dispatches an officer to the labs while keeping me on the line, asking for details about the incident which I'm happy to provide. The officer shows up though it's too late to encounter the girl. We're instructed to contact them in case she re-appears and they leave. Sure enough, she does, but we suspect from her calmer demeanor that she utilized her class time to cool down. That or her friend told her I called the police.
Anyways, the cornerstone of her case and the main point of this post being, "What would it hurt to open the labs early?"
It's a fair question and of course one that needs thorough examination in true ethical and philosophical style (and naturally in keeping with my usual process).
In a moment of weakness and my usual generosity towards strangers (and of course my brief bouts of being a Kantian) I can actually understand and sympathize with the argument. The nice thing to do (as was explicitly pointed out to me though I feel is fairly intuitive) would be to simply open the labs early to let her in. The nicEST thing to do would be to have let her in at 7:10 but the still kind thing to do would be to allow entry five minutes earlier. As she pointed out, there would literally be no harm to me, my co-worker, or the labs themselves were they to open early. I do enjoy the 30 minutes of silence and lack of responsibility between my scheduled arrival and the official opening, but there is literally no physical detriment to any concession to the opening. Many ethicists would say that I had some sort of moral obligation to help out a human being, being one myself. It's an interesting argument and one that certainly has some weight to it I've never been much for duty-based ethics.
The argument that I made (with little success to our rage-induced patron) was one of principles. First of all, the "hours of operation" sign is a rule--one that must be followed. We have a strict rule about when we close because we don't want to be here all night. If we got flexible with that out of the kindness of our hearts, we might be here all night. I take our opening time just as seriously because it doesn't make sense that opening time should carry less weight than closing time. So not only is the time for opening the lab something I have to follow for my job, but it's also the principle of the matter. If I give this girl the most credit and benefit of the doubt that I possibly can, I can perhaps assume that she worked until the wee hours of the morning and simply did not have access to a printer before her class this morning. And perhaps for whatever reason she didn't have access to a computer and printer before work yesterday. Or the day before that. Or the day before that. If that's the case then I can understand needing the lab to open early so you can print off your assignment. On the other hand (and what I immediately assumed), is that she spent all night working on it or did it so last minute that she didn't have time to print from the lab yesterday or any day before and that this is the result of some serious procrastination. Which brings me to precarious principle number 2: Don't procrastinate and don't encourage people to procrastinate by enabling their bad habits. Now I understand this is pretty high-horse of me to make myself the savior of the procrastinators but in all honesty I'm not going to bend the rules for that kind of thing. I mean I'm not going to bend them period but especially not for something like that. Now you might say, "Dylan, perhaps her printer broke last night after the lab closed." That's fine, but that's no reason to curse us for not opening the lab for you. Accept that you will be late to class (which isn't going to kill you) and print your stuff when the lab opens. It's simple.
If I was standing outside some sort of service establishment I'm sure I would receive the same treatment from whoever works there. I'm starving and standing outside a McDonald's before it opens (I guess I'm also up really, really early). Pounding on the door and cursing the workers isn't going to make them any more likely to fire up the grills early. Say Kinko's is closed (this is one of the few non-24-hour ones) and I really need to send a package. Pounding on the door is not going to make the opening worker any more likely to open his doors. I understand that opening the labs only serves as a minor inconvenience to me and that most people would say, "Don't be a dick and just open the labs." Right, I get that. But what kind of precedence are we setting as far as hours of operation goes? Or a business's rules in general? If we open five minutes early today, we might have to open five minutes earlier than that the next day. People would get used to coming early and being let in because of whatever emergency that they have. All of a sudden there's a line at the doors before I even show up. We might as well just stay open. There's a reason for it. And I admit 5 minutes seems petty and it really is but the reason it became a big deal at the five minute mark is my final point: she was being incredibly rude. We were about to open the doors when she starts making demands and spouting off curses at us. Had she been calm and just waited outside the doors, everything would have been fine. She would have been peeved about being late to her class but frankly I don't care. But it was her rudeness that caused us to wait until the 7:30 mark and her rudeness afterward that made it such a big deal. And it's because of that that I don't feel bad about what happened. Again maybe I'm on too high of a horse thinking that I'm in any position to teach someone a lesson about courtesy but either way I was much less inclined to do the favor of opening early when she was rude to me.
Was I in the right on this? I'm not sure. Some might accuse me of being cold-hearted towards someone in need, saying that the slippery slope argument provided isn't catastrophic enough to hold water against the kindness I should have shown. Similarly one might say that the principles to which I felt I must hold to (such as not rewarding procrastination or rudeness or keeping with work policies) aren't important enough to justify not helping someone in need. Frankly, I think they might be right. I don't know if what I did was right but I also don't think the need was great enough that it warranted at the very least the favor of opening the lab early for her. Especially not after she started calling me a "sick psycho" or an "asshole." I don't respond well to that. No one does. But put yourself in my shoes--you let someone into the lab to print something at 7:10. Someone walking by the lab, maybe anticipating waiting outside of it for it to open sees someone in there and says to me, "Hey, why can't I come in?" Makes sense right? So she would have gotten her five minutes early had she not been so hasty. That's all I'm saying.
Finally I can extrapolate from the event today my overarching point, the one that makes this relevant beyond a story about someone who had a bad attitude. There are always rules no matter where we go. I'm a bit conservative in the sense that I am a big fan of rules. I'm especially a fan of rules I like, but hold a sort of reverence (or at the very least a respect) for the rules that I don't. Rules are designed (in the most Hobbesian sense) to keep us on track and organized--to prevent anarchy (a word I used in my argument with the girl that didn't seem to penetrate the anger). Without them we, as selfish beings, would probably act on the whimsical impulses of our ids and some bad stuff would go down. (Here also is where I think Kantianism in general can quietly sit down and stop yelling.) I would not make universal that people have the freedom to do whatever they want but I am also theoretically morally prohibited from restricting any freedom that does not harm me. Yet there are some freedoms that while not necessarily harmful to me would be harmful to society if allowed on a mass scale. Let that sink in.
To be succinct and to summarize, there are always rules and for every rule, there is someone who doesn't want to follow it and who will fight it. I'm not advocating blind and total submission to rules especially if everyone can agree that they aren't right (in the moral and just sense). But when you make an exception in a rule, you also put a crack in it. It doesn't sit well with me when (if we take rules to be the foundation of our functioning society) we put cracks in our rules. Things will slowly but surely fall apart.
