Teamwork? No thanks, I'd rather work alone.

When I graduated from university on May 13, 2007, I forgot about many things.

Particularity how much I despise teamwork. As an executive legal assistant for a year, there was no teamwork involved. I was the sole assistant to three (demanding) attorneys. Everything that happened was done because I made it happen. I had all of the responsibility and I liked it that way.

By taking this paralegal certification class, this dislike for effort made by multiple people has been re-awakened in me. It's not because I'm bitchy and don't like people (I swear). I think it's the competitiveness in me. For class, she splits us into groups and often the task at hand is to find some obscure case. It's really not that hard and generally takes me about two minutes. I'm always the first one in the class to find the case (this is where my competitiveness comes into play) and this means that because of me, everyone in my group gets to leave early when in reality, they didn't actually do anything. I did. There was no actual teamwork involved. The first few classes, they seemed to hate me for this. Until they realized that the other group was staying much longer than we were.

Today was no different. After finding the case super quickly for everyone, I stayed behind in the law library to work on a take home test. A few hours went by and the other group still had not found a case that matched the criteria. There were six people in their group, not one of them could find it? So the instructor asked me to show them where I had found my case and how it applied to the criteria she named. So I did and it still took them another hour to find a case. Not to mention, that group really does not like me.

When we have to brief the case that I found as a team, they always insist that I write since I have the neatest handwriting. Of course I'm going to, my grade relies on it as well. This also means that when they bring up something that is obviously wrong, I will argue with them until I'm blue in the face because a) I'm insanely stubborn and b) again, it's my grade too!

All being a "team player" in a classroom setting gets me are glares and better grades for everyone on my team. Well, the nice, older man did buy me coffee since this was the third week in a row I saved the day. It's the fact that I'm doing everyone's work for them that I hate. What are they getting out of the class?