Life is much more interesting when the right music is playing in the background while you work feverishly on a project, flatter politely beg people you've just met into helping you, send awkward messages to sort-of-friends, bask in the glory of academic excellence, or do pretty much anything else. I've been wanting to do something like this for a while, and since I spent so much time working on (and occasionally complaining about) my team project and the accompanying cast of characters, that project will be the subject for this topic. Perhaps I'll do another one of these the next time I go on an interesting or annoying adventure in school or elsewhere.


Gasp! There's going to be a GROUP PROJECT in this class. Cue the most horrifying of horror music, the theme from the Zelda 64 Shadow Temple:



Other than those in my group, most of my classmates were, or knew someone who had been, In the Navy:



Choose your character! The professor says I can pick whoever I want for my group. Will I hit a home run choosing hard-working, self-motivated people, or will I strike out by assembling a bunch of individuals whose personalities clash fabulously? A remix of the SMB2 character select theme, the most fitting music for this occasion when the adventure is fresh and the possibilities endless:



Now I've gathered a couple of party members. I don't know if we have anything in common, and I don't know if anyone else knows what they're doing, but that doesn't matter: When you're listening to Fire Emblem music, you're the captain of a bunch of barely-armed adolescents waging war against a seven-nation army. Just as the strongest warrior in your army is probably a 15-year old girl in a miniskirt, the person who helped the most in my project was the one I had anticipated would contribute the least.



According to the textbook, conflict is inevitable and should be managed, not avoided (Kinicki & Fugate, 2012, 286). One such tool for dealing with conflict in a healthy manner is by listening to tense Zelda boss music when you write people to tell them to get off their bottoms. ("Please Please Me" is another fine option.)



While the textbook devotes much attention to the more optimistic Theory Y approach to organizational behavior (Kinicki & Fugate, 2012, 6), every once in a while I fall prey to the temptation to view my comrades negatively, turning into a Theory X manager who listens to the national anthem of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics:



When your group isn't working as hard as they should, I take out my frustrations on them by sneaking unprovoked "Call Me Maybe" references into group e-mails. That said, one guy did need my cell phone number, and he does adore Hurley T-shirts. (It's also harder to look right at you baby when you've been afflicted by a chronic case of glowing red eyes after getting frightfully sick during spring break.)



A creative mind might assume that the lyrics of "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" mean something more flirtatious in this context, but we didn't have much of a wild time in our team meetings, although I was briefly petrified by the feeling that I gave one of the girls the phone number of a random black guy instead of my own number (but fortunately, it turned out that I didn't make that blunder.) This jazz cover (or one very similar to it) used to play in the lobby at another campus, and now I always associate waiting for someone at college with this particular song.



We were actually planning to use this song from K16 as the background music for the presentation, but instead my model teammate used a piece of stock music she had on hand.



Yes, I do listen to copious doses of NFL Films music while working on intensive school stuff, especially when I tackled my Information Systems project back in summer. "Round Up" is a classic, of course, but you can't go wrong with "Ramblin' Man from Grambling" or "Glory Day in Green Bay" either.





Hmm, maybe we're going to get this thing done after all! Turn on some more happy, perky, Big Band-infused Mario music, even though I've never played the associated game. (Not surprisingly, other things on this album were also listened to.)



Wow, I turned it in! Five minutes before the deadline, yes, but it did get finished in a satisfactory manner.



And the best part of all: Getting your final grade and seeing that you got a perfect score on the team project and the ever-ominous peer evaluations! We probably found all the Flowers and Red Coins, too. Everything is happy and wonderful and lovely again.



(And yes, polka music also played an extensive role in the construction of this project.)

(Again, in the highly unlikely event that one of my teammates somehow locates this topic, don't take this overly seriously. Bibby topics sometimes contain a fair dose of good-natured irony, even if I do wish y'all hadn't waited until the last weekend to edit the Google Drive document!)


References
Kinicki, A., & Fugate, M. (2012). Organizational behavior: key concepts, skills & best practices (5th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill Irwin.

this is such a great idea for a topic

will you indulge me to list my own life's soundtrack?

Thanks! And yes, you should definitely do something like this too.