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Now, this is a story all about how my life got flip-turned upside down. And I’d like to take a minute, just sit right there. I’ll tell you how Ngozi Mbawuike became the prince(ss) of the Student Government Association.

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Mostly Massachusetts, born and raised. In our dorm rooms is where we spend most of our days. Chillin’ out maxin’, relaxin’ all cool and paying thousands of dollars just to be in school, when a couple of laundry machines that were up to no good started making trouble in our neighborhood.

They got a hold bunch of complaints and a coalition of Christopher Faulkner, David Robertson and Stephen Thomas-Brown all got scared and said, ‘We’re getting new dryers because these things don’t work.’

The SGA whistled for a meeting and when it came near, the laundry contract was near-void and had vague replacement clauses. If anything we could say that this deal was rare. But they thought, ‘naw forget it, yo home to new contracts.’

They pulled out of the meeting past 7 or 8 and they yelled to Automatic Laundry, ‘Yo holmes, smell ya later.’ Take a look at the kingdom, no matter what ends up there. Everything thing leads back to the president of the SGA.

Will Smith aside, that’s the gist of it. Even though the movement for the change in the laundry contract, one of the best things the happen on this campus for a while, was spearhead by area governors of the University of Massachusetts, the responsibility for the SGA decision will fall on Mbawuike. And with that goes the credit.

Unfair? Yes. Does it happen all the time? Yup.

Take this year’s stimulus package, for example. The bill itself is over 1,000 pages. Did President Barack Obama have time to write that? No way, he’s too busy filling out his NCAA bracket and doing that president thing.

Why is it then, that everyone is calling it Obama’s bill? True, that was his idea, but no one sees the coalition of congressmen that put all the work into getting the details of the bill.

Let’s say that a few politicians have spent the past 13 years fighting for a bill that would either legalize marijuana or make abortions illegal (pick one) and the bill eventually reaches the president’s desk and gets passed. The headline the next day? ‘President signs bill.’

‘ The same thing applies to UMass. Regardless of what happens behind the scenes to work on particular measures, it all goes through the president. And with the SGA, getting a reasonable idea passed is no simple task. Remember online voting?

That’s why the motion of the laundry contract getting through with little resistance is such a big deal. Was it Mbawuike’s idea? No. But just like any other SGA decision, if the laundry deal blows up, no one’s going to be complaining to the people that wrote the bill. It’s on the president’s head.

Of course, this works negatively as well. When Chancellor Robert C. Holub took office, he inherited a student body that was unhappy with the administration, to say the least. He also walked into a school where construction is going up everywhere while the school’s budget is dissolving. Most of the issues started snowballing before he even got here. Yet, you don’t see people complaining about former UMass Chancellor John Lombardi.

‘ It could be said ‘- very easily ‘- that the credit for what gets done in most organizations is far too concentrated at the top. But then again, so is the blame. Just look at former President George W. Bush, you could blame the man for literally any problem while he was in office. I mean, if Al Gore was elected, there so wouldn’t be any global warming.

It isn’t just there being misallocated credit at UMass or even in the White House. The truth is that this happens all the time and no one takes issue with it. That is until your boss takes credit for your work. Outside of complaining to your friends, writing a passive-aggressive Facebook status and posting on fmylife.com, though, there’s not a whole lot you can do.

There’s an old saying, ‘Heavy lies the crown.’ While all of the positive attention is aimed toward the Obama administrations or Holub administrations of the world, so is the ire of angry parents and students. So, though The Man might be hogging the spotlight you’ve worked so hard to get, it’s nice to know that if the scaffolding falls from the ceiling, it’s not going to be on your head.

Nick O’Malley is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].