week11.html

<title> CS349 Spring 2019: Robert McInvale</title>
<h1 style = "font-size:300%;"><b> Robert McInvale CS 349 Blog</h1></b>
<h2 style = "font-size:200%;">Week 11 - Being a Good Neighbor</h1></b>

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In my opinion, the most important thing a neighbor can do is to show respect to the members of their community. This is especially true in workplace environments, where respect has a number of concrete benefits: it can boost productivity, reduce conflicts, improve relationships between coworkers, and reduce stress.<sup>1</sup> It seems obvious, then, that we should all respect one another in the workplace, whether that workplace is an office or a school; however, the definition of respect varies from individual to individual, making the matter of fostering a respectful environment a very human (and often difficult) task.
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As an extreme introvert, the respect I require from the people around me is compromised almost solely of my need for personal space (in both a literal and figurative sense). When I was in the Navy, this space was effectively impossible to achieve. In boot camp, we spent grueling months under our drill instructors being quickly and roughly carved into a community where the individual had no purpose or place, and if my antisocial definition of respect did not conform to the Needs of the Navy... well, that was my own problem to sort out. We were required to show respect to one another in traditional, extremely standardized ways, regardless of whether the gestures, symbols, and titles of military respect met an individual’s personalized needs - because, in the eyes of the Navy, individuals did not exist.
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Thankfully, I’m not in the Navy any more. On the last day of my six years I hung up my uniform and took up a civilian life once more, and I’ve been happier every since. I’m sure that the military’s conformist approach to community building works for many people, but for someone whose idea of a good day is one in which they never speak to another human being, I could not have felt more alienated from my neighbors. The military is a very special and unusual subset of society, and in most places (including here in school), people are free to become good neighbors to one another on a per-case basis - and, thankfully, they usually are. Most of us intuitively understand that each person is different, and we know that it’s good sense to respect someone’s personal boundaries. The military just let me know how bad things can get when you take that away.


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<sup>1</sup><a href="https://content.wisestep.com/respect-important-workplace/">https://content.wisestep.com/respect-important-workplace/</a></br>