28 October 2005

Help

Man is indeed a complex creature. We just like to contradict and conflict with ourselves.

A friend in need is a friend indeed. Yes, arguably. This statement seems watertight in theory; but in practice, it is actually very much the opposite case, and the saying "too many cooks spoil the broth" comes into place.

No man is an island. We are all interdependent of each other. At some point in our life, we would certainly need to rely on another person's help. As much as we would wish those around us to lend us a helping hand in times of crisis, too much of a help provided is, at the same time, not greatly appreciated at all by us on the receiving end.

A case in point to illustrate my point would be what had happened today in school. I was busy recording my classmates' marks for the two piece of Chinese worksheets that my Chinese teacher had assigned us to do. Despite her clear instruction to the class to indicate their marks on top of their script, many failed to do so. As a result, I had to manually calculate the scores before recording. Just to digress a bit, I have nothing against those who simply could not follow orders but I would greatly appreciate if they had had the required neurones in their brain to performed as instructed.

Anyways, my Chinese teacher saw the "confusion" that I had to endure and lectured the class for not being considerate enough -- to indicate their score clearly and to help me to sort things out.

Her lecture was a successful one. Two of them came over and helped me to read out the scores of those who had indicated it on their script so that I can focussed on just recording their scores. I appreciate this help provided. But things get out of hand when both of them kept telling me scores of different students at the same time. That confused my train of thoughts a bit. When it comes to averaging the scores, it was, to be honest, a little irritating when I am currently doing my calculation in my head while hearing another person orally performing the calculation out loud. Same applies when I was told by the teacher to identify who are the top 10 performers for this piece of work.

I mean, my heart was filled with gratitude when they offered their help (even though it was only after my teacher's lecture), but when they extend their help too much, or when they helped me when I don't really need it (like performing simple calculations), I found their help redundant. I know I sound ungrateful, but seriously, when people begin to help you even though you can really manage on your own, you will be somewhat annoyed by their helpfulness.

Self-esteem? Perhaps that's the case.

So next time when you are thinking of lending a helping hand, do pause for a moment and think about whether the other party on the receiving end truly needs the help or not lest you end up destroying their self-esteem or give others a wrong impression that you are just simply an annoying hypocrite.

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