The last two weeks have been rocky, and it’s sort of nice at this point to be able to just have the wave cresting. I am doing my level best to keep a strategy and mostly it’s been a practice in learning to understand where other people are coming from, and finally learning to have compassion for people who aren’t exactly easy to respect. At the office anyway. Learning how to respect people is satisfying, even when they’re unconscionable – it gives you compassion when people would otherwise expect anger. The different ways people tear into each other is a fascinating sort of train wreck, if a bit complicated at times. The more you understand about why they do it, the better and richer life becomes, if you can survive the bruising. You can. It’s like boot camp.
My significant other and I seem to trade off on emotional states. It’s the weirdest thing I have ever seen, and I wonder if all desperately attached couples go through that, or if we’re just touching noses trying to figure out who’s alpha, and who’s omega.
The majority of my time over the past few months has been the art of keeping my hands to my sides and watching the different sorts of desperate, raging people throw different kinds of emotional punches that stop just a breath from my face. The hope is that it will incite me to throw up my arms and be the one to get aggressive. For whatever reason, people seem to think it’s acceptable to want to screw over someone who hasn’t actually done anything to them, yet they still seem to have enough of a guilt reflex to need you to be bad enough for them to feel justified in going through with their plans. They get more angry if you AREN’T into villainy. I don’t know why we go through all this. It’s the most absurd circus I’ve ever seen, but it always goes on.
I’ve got a reputation for getting things done, and for my adult life it’s been unpleasant mostly, trying to get most people on board to DO anything. In some ways it’s probably the industries I have worked in, where the steady decline or reputation of it has warded off most of the like minded people I’d feel comfortable working with.
On the other hand, even the people I do have a good professional balance with, as in the people who are bright enough to see the logic of the things I am proposing, are often pitted against each other (and me) so quickly that they never get the chance to form any sort of long-term traction.
After being at several companies where this all worked out in the same way, I’m able to finally realize the problem with the modern company isn’t the company, but the people who go work for them with the expectation that there is no such thing as business ethics. Right now I’m working with a man who I know has stolen from one of our previous coworkers at another company, a man who is married and led on a twenty year old office assistant who broke down and left, a woman who screams so cruelly at one of her employees the entire office chills, and another office assistant who regularly ruins the reputations of everyone around her in a bid to get a bigger title and more than a pittance salary. My thinking is more, why sell your soul screwing other people over so madly for such a pittance, but then her boss tells me she has no time to train the girl because they have drummed out the last associate and there is no budget to replace the groundling staff. What comes around, goes around as they say. The key is in how you handle it.
All the times people afraid for their jobs have turned nasty, making whatever they want to make of my age or background or whatever, i stay as unfazed as possible. I just stand still, wipe away the spit, and offer alternatives. I was warned not to outdo the work done in another division, but in my opinion, then I really would be wasting my time. Crazy people I am willing to put up with. But I’m not cut out for doing nothing. It’s not pleasing, and while I’ve had some bouts of just being ground down so much that I can’t even concentrate for the next hour on my todo list, I recognize that for what it is, and inhospitable or not, i use it to practice on calming my anxiety. One of the best self-cures of anxiety-riddled people, is to square off with the dragon queens who really do try and break you. You’ve already worried your way through just about any nasty, sharp comment they can come up with, so you might as well go through it finally, and remember for next time that in the end, you handed it well, and it doesn’t really change you as a person if you’re solid in who you are. It’s just more proof, really.
There’s a weird click that happens to people in desperate situations. It’s an excellent observational opportunity to see humanity as the zoo it is. I realize that most of the pulled punches at me were actually considered favors, encouraging me to learn to fight, but the truth is, I know how to fight, and I know how to fight dirty, I’m just not into the office political scene, and definitely not enough to have a throw-down over it. I’m long retired from being friends and surfing circles where this is the norm. I’m looking for zen.
I don’t fight because there’s a reason why we’re all pointed in the directions we are, and there is always more to the scenario than he said, she said. The people instigating the daily skirmishes know this as well, but they don’t suppose the groundlings are going to figure it out, so fists are waved in our faces with the hope that we fall in line with divine edict quietly and silently.
When quietly and silently doesn’t work, it kicks up a notch. People start experimenting on each other with typical school yard bullying tactics.
I know all this. It’s not that I’m stupid, it’s that I’m an objector. It’s like a war being fought to bring in some regime that’s going to starve everyone. I’m a professional. I don’t want to spend the last of my integrity on some petty cat fight. I’m here to learn and the one thing I’ve learned repeatedly is that there really is no one you can trust in these situations. I may guardedly tell people when something horrible just happened to me by the water cooler not because I expect them to really be good people and do anything about it. I occasionally offer things only as a way of compassion and showing people the effects of their nastiness. Encouraging the zen, in other words.
I understand that there are different levels at which people will throw the switch. Most people sadly do enjoy being nuts. The thrill they get from abusing and pulling power is a big up from the bad treatment they get from some other person. But being adaptable comes in all creative forms, and one of them, the best I think, is just learning to get so good at your job that your defense is more trouble to blast through than it’s worth. The day my boss got so mad at me for not popping off at her (or quitting) that she broke her pen, I heaved an invisible sigh of satisfaction.
The coordinator who spent time weeping in the bathroom as silently as she could was not met with compassion from the ladies at the door, but later by whispered scorn. We all sat while the pigeons pecked her, and while you can try and offer compassion to people, as the game goes, when someone is trying to squeeze you out of the organization, the first thing they do is try and pit you against other office mates who might otherwise make you strong to stand up and have an opinion.
By the time I heard she was in trouble, she was already so closed off there was nothing I could do but a few emoticons and kind good morning. Just insert a little human decency into her day, knowing the same people who are kind one moment to me, are the same ones who have no real sense of responsibility, or perhaps just lack recognition that this is something they are doing to another human being that is wrong. “If it works,” smiled one of the coordinators at me one day. “She doesn’t even realize it’s possible,” said another. “Her mind doesn’t work that way.” Actually, it does. My decision at kindness is a choice, not a defect. There are a million ways people can screw each other at the office. I’ve had people pop off at me for “saving emails” so many times it’s comical. Foot stamping at me for being right and having the organizational capability to forward the conversation in five minutes. I see it coming.
It’s like clockwork, and after you’ve seen it a few times, you know what it is, and you know where it’s going.
Take the conversation I had with someone today. The woman doesn’t read anything – not emails or special instructions, nothing, and says so as if this is an unalienable right of middle management. Other people have complained that she has terrible communication skills, but I know better. I’ve had conversations with her before, and while there’s a lot she doesn’t get, it’s a sort of willful ignorance. We’ve been dyeing of frustration with her, and more than once I’ve functionally done her job.
I don’t mind doing people’s jobs. It’s good training. It’s how I can waltz into a meeting and suddenly know what I’m talking about. It’s not sudden at all, I’ve been in the background busting my chops. But to people who really want to believe the social order, they give you the mock shock that you really know what’s going on, because to admit with a wink and a nudge that you’re good at what you do might empower you to take a stand, and that’s what it’s all about.
The reason strong innovation in corporate America crumbles is in the aggregate of all the little businesses falling into the sea. People like my boss, who as of today is no longer my boss, have screamed and raged at how some people only show up to work to save college money for their kids. I’ve spent my own mornings annoyed that I’m fighting the fire fight I was hired to do, and yet for all the work I put into it, when it comes time to pull out the contract on some vendor and really go to the mat, these sorts of people look at you like kids on the play ground, who’ve just had a scuffle. I agree, it is infuriating, because without backing you’re dust.
But something strange has happened recently. After all the hair pulling and teeth gnashing done in my direction by the frustrated and the clueless, I’ve finally found compassion for all these weirdoes. For all her obstinate brush-offs and complete lack of engagement with the office, at the end of the day she actually had something to say, and it was good advice.
“In six months, no one will know how hard you worked. They won’t remember or care. You have to set your priorities. It’s easier when you have kids, because you just can’t stay in the office late. I’ve got a baby-sitter. I have to pick them up. It’s taken me years to learn to find a balance with my work life.”
Just when you wonder if the lights are on, something like this happens, and really I don’t think it’s too much to expect that it can happen in regular intervals from people who you work with.
It’s just usually it doesn’t, I find, which is probably why I spend my time in my apartment either too anxious to enjoy myself or too exhausted to entertain company. I’m paying my bills.
Going back to the idea of keeping your hands to your sides though, would I have understood or been able to see clearly the path these people are on if I had given in to just hating everyone around me? No. There’s just no way to survive in such an inhospitable environment when people are intent to force you out, if you let them trap you down like that.
I think I’m a good person. I think I’m good at my job – maybe too good at this point, which is how I get the black mark from new hires who have a good conversation with me early on, and then are immediately threatened by someone else with the fear that I’m after their jobs. The idea is to keep the younger ones out of alliances so that the older ones can coast to retirement. And most of the time it works, like a mechanical process so well-greased nobody ever hears it.
This new guy and I would be a fabulous duo if we were allowed to be on the same team. But now that it’s clear we won’t be, the little whisperings of insecurity have seeped in. My boss squaring off with his boss months ago during early rumors of transferring me out of my group. The constant push to belittle everyone wearing on this poor guy’s face like a quiet rage.
Would they actually lay him off? What about the rumors instigated by my old boss, who looked at me one day, forgetting I’m not really one of her kind, and asked deliciously, “so… what are you going to do with HIM?” It wasn’t a sexual suggestion. It was an assumption of man-eating destruction. The she looked at me, my eyebrow raised, and remembered who she was talking to.
In an office where walls are paper thin, if he heard that, and he’s not experienced enough to realize when there’s been a setup, I’m not surprised he’s trying desperately to figure out how to crash what’s left of my options to navigate around the layoffs.
Actually, I think that was the point. Stick us in a small, enclosed space, suggest to one of us that the other is out to get them, and see which one of us cracks and goes after the other one first.
There is a quiet joy to recognizing this sort of horse-shit. I don’t know. I suppose there is a protection to people thinking you are completely naive. But at the same time, I think people choose to believe what they want because maybe to look at someone who is working hard and not swiping at other people, it brings up a little reflux of guilt. I think maybe that’s a good thing. Being reunited with their inner humanity is a good thing. I don’t feel bad about continuing on the path if that’s the core source of the reaction.
In any case, it’s good to have given the effort and not quit on the goal. When you stay above board and do the best you can you can, you can leave and turn the lights out, and not have to carry any baggage out with you.
For a position I was told I would be rubbed out of within the first few weeks, having lasted to my anniversary was an accomplishment. It’s another square in my pattern, something rich, and complex and interesting, and it’s the tail end of a company era that we won’t see again. I’ve gone and I’ve proven myself there. It all works out in the end.
Now I just gotta find the next way to pay my rent.
