Okay so I live in one of my university's residences. It happens to be the smallest residence, only housing about 300 students, so you see a lot of familiar faces, and know a number of people by name even though you don't hang out with them. So there's this one guy he is always really friendly, and has a heavy chinese-mandarin accent, but his english is fairly fluent. He always says how he's excited to meet new people, and tries getting involved with the residence events (ex. taking pictures and video of residence events and uploading them to facebook, or going out with friends in residence etc.) Also I've seen him asking for advice about applying for job positions or leadership positions within residence, like "what is the easiest to get into" and "what work it involves" and so forth. 
 
Okay so 3 other background things that need to be mentioned before getting to what actually happened today: 1. My residence has a room with a grand piano that can be reserved at the front desk. You need a key to remove the lock from the cover of the grand piano. Since I play piano, I reserve it for about an hour each day, on weekdays. 2. In order to get back into residence next year, you have to do a Reapplication. The main thing they are looking for is involvement in the residence. There is one specific section of the reapplication for Peer Evaluation. Basically, you put down the name of the resident you want to comment on, check whether they made a positive/negative contribution to the residence, and make any comments if you want. 3. An upper year resident made a handy facebook group for people who are reapplying for residence. I'll get back to this later.
 
Okay, so today when I went to the piano room, I was practicing alright for a while. Then the asian guy, let's just call him John, that I mentioned earlier, comes in... with two other people a guy and a girl, who were clearly non-residents (it is protocol at our residence to sign in and out guests, and be with our guests at all times). He says to me off-handedly "oh nice music," to which I mumble "thanks." Now I thought, okay he's just showing his friends the music room and they'll be gone in a few seconds. No, one of his friends carries in an electric keyboard and they start hooking it up to the wall. And then John leaves the room saying to his 2 friends, "yeah if they ask who you are just say you're with John and my room number". 
 
That's when I started getting angry. I was thinking, "What are they thinking? I reserved this room days ago and they're going to come in here and think they can push me out?" Honestly I felt like punching one of them, but I remembered I probably wouldn't get back into residence if I did that. I was able to get them NOT to practice by asking them, but they had to stay in the room because John had left them, and they wouldn't have a key to get back in. I had trouble concentrating for the remainder of the session. At one point the girl went outside to talk on the phone, then when I was done practicing and she went back into the room I heard her say, "Oh he finally left." Now I was ready to go back in there and start yelling, but again that wouldn't have done anything. What really struck me was the absolute disrespect of how they came in and didn't even ask if they could use the room, and then proceeded to almost start practicing.
 
Now this gets me back to Peer Evaluations. Now basically how I've been filling it out, is by looking at members of the Facebook group, seeing who I know and writing comments about them and how they participate in residence stuff. The thinking behind this is that, I would want other people to be positive about me, and I certainly wouldn't want to screw someone over by writing negative comments them, or by having people write negative comments about me. Now John was one of the people I wrote down. After this incident I almost considered changing my comment about him to be negative. But then I remember that probably wouldn't make a difference either because he's spent his whole time in residence trying to be friendly with everyone and probably has many positive evaluations from other people. 

Now I'm just really annoyed, and pissed off. At the whole idea of Peer Evaluation as a sort of Prisoner's Dilemma, at John (and by extension most Mandarin-Chinese people) and of course my own ineptitude.