I blame myself

I blame myself all the time, even for stuff over which I have absolutely no control.  It's a hazard in teaching and other jobs and everything else in life if the expectations of yourself don't match with the reality of your actions and their actions.  My problem is that not only do I think that I should be able control my own behaviour but I should also be able to predict and anticipate the actions of others.  In particular, I blame myself for not anticipating malicious competition that may be a fact of life in business or politics but which I had not expected to find in education.  I figured that because we all get paid the same no matter what we do or don't do on the job or in the way of extra-curricular, we'd all just relax and help each other out and behave like a team rather than a bunch of individuals and yet, irony wins out. It would seem that if people can't compete based on objective determiners such as income, sales, projects completed, votes, safety records then they must find some other method of demonstrating their superiority over the herd, something more personal and malicious like gossip and put-downs and subject area superiority.