Bent out of shape
Jun. 28th, 2019 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
roselightfairy[Look under the cut for extensive explication of workplace pettiness. Please don't hate me.]
A cliched phrase, yes – but, I think, with reason. It describes with surprising accuracy the way I feel right now – as though the wire hanger of my psyche has been tugged and stretched and twisted, something not quite right about the functioning of my mental processes. As though they’re unable to do the job they need to do because of that external force that has pulled them out of the form they’re meant to have.
Oh, and it’s a small and silly thing, too, no doubt; surely I’m just too sensitive, but I just – I so dislike when people are mad at me.
It’s a coworker, in this case. And let me take this moment to soapbox about how open office spaces are the absolute worst. Sound carries – the smallest conversations had best be held without any anticipation of privacy; those who aren’t involved don’t join in only out of politeness. (We all come to obey an oddly unspoken social code that we pretend as though there are barriers between us, when really there is nothing.) The smallest noises echo; the larger ones boom. My first few weeks working there, I hardly dared to make a peep; cringed every time I bumped into something or pushed the echoing metal book cart over the bump at the base of the door. Certain everyone was going to hate me for every small sound I made.
Time and the necessities of my job got me over that – I work, mostly, with the physical materials in the library. Which means pulling tape to repair books, pushing books back and forth between the different shelving locations in our open space. Occasionally trying to shelve paperback textbooks (the new bane of my existence; like liquid they have no form of their own but merely slide into flat bookshelf-puddles) and weathering the shower as multiple other books tumble from the shelves along with them. I have had to shed some of my self-consciousness in order to do my job – and getting to know my coworkers better (and trust them not to despise me) helped with that as well.
But maybe I should have kept some of that self-consciousness, after all, because it seems I have infuriated one of them with the noise of my existence.
It’s happened twice now; I’ve been in her vicinity doing something unavoidably noisy, and I’ve heard her mutter something disparaging – not obviously about me, per se, but at a convenient time – and with a fury in her voice that has left me breathless.
This time it was most obviously about me, since the phrase “back and forth” was involved, at a time when I was – guess – walking back and forth between my desk and the shelving space. (It doesn’t help, of course, that her desk is right smack in the middle of our space, meaning that I have to pass it on every trip, and there are many.) At the time, I was moving shelf after shelf-load of books from one shelving unit to another, as part of a restructuring project ordered by my supervisor. (The manual labor in the unit? Yours truly.) And I was making more trips than necessary, it’s true. But in my defense, I had never done something like this before; it was a restructuring of the contents of the shelves, not just the location, and the magnitude of my task occasionally left me scatterbrained, forgetting things in one location when they should have been in the other.
Anyway, after I had recovered from feeling like I had been punched in the gut, I finished my task, as I had to. Then, later, when I had a quiet moment to myself, I did what I had done the last time this happened – sent out an all-office apology email. I tried to keep it polite but somewhat defensive: our weeding project is happening on those shelves; over the next few weeks there will be activity there; I’m sorry about any disturbance; please let me know if there’s anything I can do. I tried to keep it as polite as possible, while also wording it in such a way that she would know I had heard, and that I was sorry – but also that I was a bit stung.
(I am a little bit vengefully satisfied that another coworker responded first, in a reply-all, with, “it’s not bothering me! Bustle away!” I never claimed to be a good person.)
Anyway, today I received a response from the problem coworker in question confirming my suspicions. Like my email, it was worded politely, and overtly there is nothing to complain about in it. “Thank you for asking. I am the noise-sensitive one in the group.” A subtle response, perhaps, or an acknowledgement that she knew that I knew that she was the one who had the problem with me to begin with. And kind of her to be open about it, at least. She cited the location of her desk – an entirely fair complaint – as a source of disturbance, and then suggested that I “reduce the trips back and forth” and also the “banging around.”
It’s that phrasing that I have an issue with – that phrasing that tugs at the edges of my coathanger soul and renders me nothing but a useless coil of wire, grumpy for no discernible reason. It just feels oddly condescending – it seems to suggest that my job is reducible to the “banging around” of a child with her parents’ pots in the kitchen. Which itself implies that I have a choice in the matter – as though when my book cart runs into the edge of a table I’m doing it on purpose, specifically to irritate her.
The ironic thing is that I think the banging has been louder today because I’ve been trying to take the route that circumvents her desk – a route much less favorable to the book cart, and much more conducive to the banging-on-edges.
I responded apologetically and politely. I sympathized with the inconvenient location of her desk, just in the middle of everything; “I can see how that would be irritating to deal with.” I apologized for the noise, and promised to try to be quieter. But I did defend myself a bit, in a very self-disparaging way – “unfortunately, I am a very fallible human who sometimes forgets a cart and has to make two trips . . . I’m working on becoming more efficient, but the nature of my work is such that the trial and error tends to be noisy . . . I promise I’m trying.” I ended it by thanking her for her honesty (which was meant to be a response to that quiet acknowledgement of her anger of yesterday) and promising to try to do better.
And then I sent the email while she was in the bathroom, restarted my computer, and left for the weekend before she emerged.
All the while I walked home from work, I stewed about it. Certainly I was just too sensitive, I told myself, certainly she was within her rights to be frustrated by the noise – but also, did she hear me complaining about her multiple phone calls that we all have to listen to? Which she obviously has more control over than my occasionally dropping seven books on my head? I wished I had added a parenthetical unfunny joke: “(Believe me, I also don’t want the books to be falling off the shelves.)” I hoped that – if nothing else – she felt guilty for muttering about me. I tried to be sympathetic to her, but I was too frustrated, too twisted up with the odd combination of guilt and anger and hurt, to be able to do it.
Bent out of shape.
But – oddly enough – the very process of writing this has, I think, been an unbending. The tight coils of wire have loosened, the shape straightened back out into something resembling a coathanger again. (Yes, I know this extended metaphor was a weak one. Just go with me, okay?) I feel – not necessarily resolved with the situation. I have no idea how she’ll respond, or if she will. It’s very probably that I’ll start second-guessing my phrasing within the next two minutes, start wishing I’d been more contrite without any of the defensiveness present in my apologies. I might go back to seesawing between guilt and anger, or might sink back into the easy hurt of victimhood.
But, if only just for the moment, I feel okay.
A cliched phrase, yes – but, I think, with reason. It describes with surprising accuracy the way I feel right now – as though the wire hanger of my psyche has been tugged and stretched and twisted, something not quite right about the functioning of my mental processes. As though they’re unable to do the job they need to do because of that external force that has pulled them out of the form they’re meant to have.
Oh, and it’s a small and silly thing, too, no doubt; surely I’m just too sensitive, but I just – I so dislike when people are mad at me.
It’s a coworker, in this case. And let me take this moment to soapbox about how open office spaces are the absolute worst. Sound carries – the smallest conversations had best be held without any anticipation of privacy; those who aren’t involved don’t join in only out of politeness. (We all come to obey an oddly unspoken social code that we pretend as though there are barriers between us, when really there is nothing.) The smallest noises echo; the larger ones boom. My first few weeks working there, I hardly dared to make a peep; cringed every time I bumped into something or pushed the echoing metal book cart over the bump at the base of the door. Certain everyone was going to hate me for every small sound I made.
Time and the necessities of my job got me over that – I work, mostly, with the physical materials in the library. Which means pulling tape to repair books, pushing books back and forth between the different shelving locations in our open space. Occasionally trying to shelve paperback textbooks (the new bane of my existence; like liquid they have no form of their own but merely slide into flat bookshelf-puddles) and weathering the shower as multiple other books tumble from the shelves along with them. I have had to shed some of my self-consciousness in order to do my job – and getting to know my coworkers better (and trust them not to despise me) helped with that as well.
But maybe I should have kept some of that self-consciousness, after all, because it seems I have infuriated one of them with the noise of my existence.
It’s happened twice now; I’ve been in her vicinity doing something unavoidably noisy, and I’ve heard her mutter something disparaging – not obviously about me, per se, but at a convenient time – and with a fury in her voice that has left me breathless.
This time it was most obviously about me, since the phrase “back and forth” was involved, at a time when I was – guess – walking back and forth between my desk and the shelving space. (It doesn’t help, of course, that her desk is right smack in the middle of our space, meaning that I have to pass it on every trip, and there are many.) At the time, I was moving shelf after shelf-load of books from one shelving unit to another, as part of a restructuring project ordered by my supervisor. (The manual labor in the unit? Yours truly.) And I was making more trips than necessary, it’s true. But in my defense, I had never done something like this before; it was a restructuring of the contents of the shelves, not just the location, and the magnitude of my task occasionally left me scatterbrained, forgetting things in one location when they should have been in the other.
Anyway, after I had recovered from feeling like I had been punched in the gut, I finished my task, as I had to. Then, later, when I had a quiet moment to myself, I did what I had done the last time this happened – sent out an all-office apology email. I tried to keep it polite but somewhat defensive: our weeding project is happening on those shelves; over the next few weeks there will be activity there; I’m sorry about any disturbance; please let me know if there’s anything I can do. I tried to keep it as polite as possible, while also wording it in such a way that she would know I had heard, and that I was sorry – but also that I was a bit stung.
(I am a little bit vengefully satisfied that another coworker responded first, in a reply-all, with, “it’s not bothering me! Bustle away!” I never claimed to be a good person.)
Anyway, today I received a response from the problem coworker in question confirming my suspicions. Like my email, it was worded politely, and overtly there is nothing to complain about in it. “Thank you for asking. I am the noise-sensitive one in the group.” A subtle response, perhaps, or an acknowledgement that she knew that I knew that she was the one who had the problem with me to begin with. And kind of her to be open about it, at least. She cited the location of her desk – an entirely fair complaint – as a source of disturbance, and then suggested that I “reduce the trips back and forth” and also the “banging around.”
It’s that phrasing that I have an issue with – that phrasing that tugs at the edges of my coathanger soul and renders me nothing but a useless coil of wire, grumpy for no discernible reason. It just feels oddly condescending – it seems to suggest that my job is reducible to the “banging around” of a child with her parents’ pots in the kitchen. Which itself implies that I have a choice in the matter – as though when my book cart runs into the edge of a table I’m doing it on purpose, specifically to irritate her.
The ironic thing is that I think the banging has been louder today because I’ve been trying to take the route that circumvents her desk – a route much less favorable to the book cart, and much more conducive to the banging-on-edges.
I responded apologetically and politely. I sympathized with the inconvenient location of her desk, just in the middle of everything; “I can see how that would be irritating to deal with.” I apologized for the noise, and promised to try to be quieter. But I did defend myself a bit, in a very self-disparaging way – “unfortunately, I am a very fallible human who sometimes forgets a cart and has to make two trips . . . I’m working on becoming more efficient, but the nature of my work is such that the trial and error tends to be noisy . . . I promise I’m trying.” I ended it by thanking her for her honesty (which was meant to be a response to that quiet acknowledgement of her anger of yesterday) and promising to try to do better.
And then I sent the email while she was in the bathroom, restarted my computer, and left for the weekend before she emerged.
All the while I walked home from work, I stewed about it. Certainly I was just too sensitive, I told myself, certainly she was within her rights to be frustrated by the noise – but also, did she hear me complaining about her multiple phone calls that we all have to listen to? Which she obviously has more control over than my occasionally dropping seven books on my head? I wished I had added a parenthetical unfunny joke: “(Believe me, I also don’t want the books to be falling off the shelves.)” I hoped that – if nothing else – she felt guilty for muttering about me. I tried to be sympathetic to her, but I was too frustrated, too twisted up with the odd combination of guilt and anger and hurt, to be able to do it.
Bent out of shape.
But – oddly enough – the very process of writing this has, I think, been an unbending. The tight coils of wire have loosened, the shape straightened back out into something resembling a coathanger again. (Yes, I know this extended metaphor was a weak one. Just go with me, okay?) I feel – not necessarily resolved with the situation. I have no idea how she’ll respond, or if she will. It’s very probably that I’ll start second-guessing my phrasing within the next two minutes, start wishing I’d been more contrite without any of the defensiveness present in my apologies. I might go back to seesawing between guilt and anger, or might sink back into the easy hurt of victimhood.
But, if only just for the moment, I feel okay.
