I learn again....

***ETA: It seems that it was just a moment of badly-expressed anger. Things seem to be OK now. I'm just not good at dealing with sudden outbursts as I tend to be one of those more slow-fuse people that it takes a while to really anger. Anyway. I think I need to go and get some more Emergency Chocolate and an extra set of lantern batteries because this storm looks like it's going to be even bigger and worse than I was anticipating. ***

How I generally fail at dealing well with angry people.

Anger, real anger (rather than just annoyance) scares me. I don't know why; it's not like I came from an abusive background where anger came out of the blue and led to hitting. If anything, in my family, anger was fairly rare.

It might be because I had a pretty bad temper as a teen and 20-something, and just by hard work and force of will I've managed to mold it into something where I use a flowchart of "Is this anger over some injustice, Y/N?" and if the answer is "Y" then the next step is "Then what can you do to right it" and if the answer is "N" the next step is "go for a walk until you feel better/go vent to a safe person/go somewhere private and scream a little, then get over it"

But anyway. I had one of the people who failed to hand in a paper show up today. And tried to hand me a paper. And I looked at it and said, "I'm sorry, I can't accept that. It's past the deadline."

Student got angry but things seem okay now. I hate to think of them failing the class over this, but based on their talking about their research, there was no clear reason as to why the paper wasn't done on the due date - no illness, no emergency, so I can't justify going ahead and grading it anyway.