As a conflict resolution specialist, I have been involved in some very difficult situations in my career before.  I work with both teenagers and adults, and it’s more difficult to work with adults, in my opinion, because they don’t play as fair.  They’re also much more prone to becoming offended if there are any perceived insults, and these usually are only perceived, existing in the offended party’s mind alone.  And they also seem much more easily capable of resorting to threats of violence.  I prefer adolescents, as unstable as those hormonal outbursts can be.  They have not yet learned to make the most of their ability to inflict harm in this world.

There haven’t been many cases as extraordinarily difficult as the one that brought me to Fort Wayne.  A reservation in a hotel had already been set up for me, so I would be able to land and get over to the site as soon as I could.  I didn’t even stop to shower, because I’d heard that things were getting very heated.  I made my way to the community center, and even from the outside I could hear that there was a very large commotion going on.

Very few people would have guessed that the director of the choir would be able to hold the wrestling coach in a headlock for very long.  Even on a very bad day for the coach, a very short minute would be the most.  But it was obvious that this was going on for quite awhile, and I wasn’t sure if anyone had tried to break it up.  The schedules had been mixed up, someone explained to me, and the concert and the meet were both set for the same days, and no one wanted to give.  At times like these, I start to go over my notes about how to handle skirmishes between nations, in order to get myself ready for dealing with the more difficult problems, like separating locked adults.

Wrestling with the Choir in Fort Wayne is a post from: Cool Comment