The shit bucket

The concept of the shit bucket was first introduced to me by Sarah Robinson while we were both graduate students at ASU. The theory goes something like this:

For everyone in your life you have a bucket, which holds the amount of shit you are wiling to put up with for that person. The bucket gets filled by the things about the person that annoy you or rub you the wrong way or the inconsiderate and disrespectful things they do and it gets emptied by nice things they do or time spent apart. It can be thought of as one of those problems from differential equations where you need to calculate the time until a container with a certain volume fills as water flows in at a rate dA/dt and flows out at a rate dB/dt. As long at the rate in is less than the rate out, the bucket will never fill:

dB/dt ≥ dA/dt

but if the rate in is greater than the rate out

dA/dt ≥ dB/dt

Then the bucket fills and eventually overflows. If it gets to the point where it overflows bad things happen. For people you love, the rate in is usually slow and they usually are respectful enough of you that the rate out is much greater than the rate in. You also tend to have a larger capacity for taking shit from these people. However, for people that you are not particularly fond of, it is easy for the rate in is usually larger than the rate out and you often have to remove yourself from the presence of said person for a period of time in order to let the bucket drain a bit. If you have to be around this person constantly, it is easy for the rate in to over come the rate out and for your shit bucket for that particular person to fill and overflow. This could happen say if you have to spend two weeks from breakfast through dinner in the field with someone , for example, hypothetically speaking. If you can not remove yourself from the situation to let the bucket drain, you may find yourself being snippy with said person, trying to block out their voice when they speak, wishing they would shut up for a minute and stop thinking they are so god damned clever, and perhaps even thinking violent thoughts about burying them in the mud and leaving them for the flies.