At Work, People Despise Each Other

I think it is worth mentioning -- actually, it is something that I wanted to note last week when I relaunched these posts on work, with the intention of sticking to it this time and recording my observations at least once a week -- that my coworkers despise each other.

It makes for parlous moments. I'll be discussing something with one coworker when another coworker approaches. Suddenly there is the cold electric current of hatred and hostility and I'm stuck right in the middle, absorbing it. Generally, I try to tie up the conversation quickly and be on my way.

The situation is the result of people working together for many, many years. Most of the people are women. And while it would be convenient to make it a gender thing and dismiss it as women being catty, it is not. Men -- some of the business agents -- practice the chilly burn and malevolent stare as well; they are just more low-key about it.

People work together for years, decades, and wrongs, perceived and real, accumulate. Finally a decision is made to cease all but the most necessary and perfunctory communication.

For me, since I have been at this particular work site for less than three years now, I have not accumulated a reservoir of ill will similar to my coworkers, many of whom have been working together for 15 years or more. I only have the unfortunate situation of the one woman, who tends to the bipolar, with whom I have fell afoul. So for the most part I have the luxury of moving comfortably between and communicating freely with everyone on the job.

This is not without its burdens since I am often used as a tacit go-between for coworkers who are so nauseated at the prospect of dealing with one another they would rather angle a third party into doing it for them.

From the prologue to Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All or None (1883–1885):

Then something happened that made every mouth dumb and every eye rigid. For meanwhile the tightrope walker had begun his performance: he had stepped out of a small door and was walking over the rope, stretched between two towers and suspended over the market place and the people. When he had reached the exact middle of his course the small door opened once more and a fellow in motley clothes, looking like a jester, jumped out and followed the first one with quick steps. 

"Forward, lamefoot!" he shouted in an awe-inspiring voice. "Forward, lazybones, smuggler, pale-face, or I shall tickle you with my heel! What are you doing here between towers? The tower is where you belong. You ought to be locked up; you block the way for one better than yourself." And with every word he came closer and closer; but when he was but one step behind, the dreadful thing happened which made every mouth dumb and every eye rigid: he uttered a devilish cry and jumped over the man who stood in his way. 

This man, however, seeing his rival win, lost his head and the rope, tossed away his pole, and plunged into the depth even faster, a whirlpool of arms and legs. The market place became as the sea when a tempest pierces it: the people rushed apart and over one another, especially at the place where the body must hit the ground. 

Zarathustra, however, did not move; and it was right next to him that the body fell, badly maimed and disfigured, but not yet dead. After a while the shattered man recovered consciousness and saw Zarathustra kneeling beside him. "What are you doing here?" he asked at last. 'I have long known that the devil would trip me. Now he will drag me to hell. Would you prevent him?" 

"By my honor, friend," answered Zarathustra, "all that of which you speak does not exist: there is no devil and no hell. Your soul will be dead even before your body: fear nothing further."

The man looked up suspiciously. "If you speak the truth," he said, "I lose nothing when I lose my life. I am not much more than a beast that has been taught to dance by blows and a few meager morsels." 

"By no means," said Zarathustra. "You have made danger your vocation; there is nothing contemptible in that. Now you perish of your vocation: for that I will bury you with my own hands." 

When Zarathustra had said this, the dying man answered no more; but he moved his hand as if he sought Zarathustra's hand in thanks.

Silence + "Coffin for Head of State, Pt. 2"

My Monday evening contemplation of work presents the following thought for your consideration: The importance of silence.

The more you talk at work the more likely it is that something you say will be held against you somewhere down the line.

So I am attempting to refocus my energies on keeping my mouth shut. This does not mean being unpleasant or icy. I converse when addressed, and I engage people when I feel like I have something that needs to be said. But I am trying not to babble and interject and fill the bullpen area where I work with monkey-mind chatter. I have even placed a post-it note that I can see on my way out the front door of my apartment in the morning. The note reads, "Silence."

The musical immersion from this past weekend was The Best Best of Fela Kuti, a double disk released in 2000. Tremendous. It can be listened to repeatedly. You'll find yourself floating in a placental fluid. Here's "Coffin for Head of State":

"Our Lives Are Shaped By What We Love"

Monday evening is the time of the week that this blog is devoted to a contemplation of employment. The idea is that one is still somewhat fresh from the weekend and can see the horror of the job with clear eyes.

I knew it was going to be a rough one. I had stacked running days over the weekend, going out both Saturday and Sunday. And this usually means that I am wiped out Monday morning. And such was the case today.

What kept me on track, what kept hope alive, was the thought that once I got home I would eat one of the peaches that have been ripening on my kitchen windowsill.

Mission accomplished. The peach was delicious.

Who are we? We are names on bills sent to street addresses. We are rats in the race. Most of us work all our lives, and in the end we have nothing. No one wants us anymore. We are juiced out. All those years of work and not even a defined-benefit pension to show for it. No, it's a gritty game of survival, and one that has become demonstrably more difficult since I started thirty years ago.

The only thing to do is keep moving and stay busy. It sounds like advice straight out of Pollyanna's mouth. And I wish had something better to peddle here, but I don't. Keeping on the move and the mind focused generally works.

This weekend -- this is how I like to conclude my tired thoughts about the job, talking about what I listened to over the weekend -- I immersed myself in Our Lives Are Shaped By What We Love: Motown’s Mowest Story 1971-1973 put out by Light In The Attic Records. Barry Gordy Jr. tried to make it on the West Coast by launching the Mowest label in the early 1970s. It only survived a couple of years.

I particularly enjoyed the tracks by Odyssey. Here's their "Our Lives Are Shaped By What We Love":

Another tasty cut -- the rhythm section cooks -- is "The Night" by Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons:

"Ohio" + Plastic Paper Clips from the 1980s

I thought I had finally finished my box transport and shelving project today only to find out at 3 PM that I've got a big day ahead of me tomorrow. There turns out to be a closet, a large closet, in the business manager's office filled with boxes of documents that need to be labeled, added to the database, transported to the new building and then shelved. I'd say I'm looking at 30 more boxes.

Today I savored pulling what I thought were the last files out of their banker boxes and placing them on the metal shelving. Modest Mouse's "Ohio" played on the iPod (my touch screen has gone dark, but it still works):

I forgot how good their first album is. I see that Christgau gave This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About (1996) an A-minus.

One of the joys of my job is finding treasures secreted away for decades in banker boxes. I found a pristine envelope filled with colored plastic paperclips that used to be popular in the 1980's. It provided a window on what the future looked like in the past:

Along with the obsolete colored plastic paperclips was an excellent little brochure on fleas put out in 1985 by Washington State Department of Social & Health Services:

Why did the business representative have a flea pamphlet in his papers? Maybe there was a grievance filed by a union member being forced to work in a flea-invested environment.

Broken Glass at the Bottom of My Refrigerator

A 90-minute meeting after work, something which in my thirties was a walk in the park, is a hill almost too steep to climb now. I explained to a coworker, who mercifully drove me home after our monthly political action committee meeting ended, that there was a time when I attended and participated in 17-straight days of post-work meetings and actions, weekends included. "That's when I had more testosterone," I told her. It was late spring 2001 and it corresponded with all the organizing around the shooting of Aaron Roberts and attempts to establish some viable form of police accountability in the city.

When I got back to the apartment, I ate an apple and some peanuts; watched a portion of an episode from Homeland (season 1) on my computer; and then promptly hit the hay.

In slumberland I struck upon a dreaded "nightly double": a vivid dream about my last girlfriend (the predator) followed by a lengthy, vivid work dream.

The dream about my old girlfriend conformed to the pattern common to dreams featuring old girlfriends and my ex-wife: I am once again in their company; and while I am sexually attracted to them still I know that a consummation of that desire will have dire consequences. So the dream is spent fretting, "Should I stay or should I go? If I go there will be trouble. If I stay it will be double." The only peculiarity to last night's iteration is the old girlfriend's level of insanity; in the dream she was downright homeless-schizophrenic crazy.

The work dream was elaborate, convoluted and no doubt had its origin in the waking reality of helping to get two separate contract ratification votes in the mail this week. In the dream there is some sort of grand barbecue underway for the union membership and in preparation for that a new type of carpeted floorboard has been laid down in the dining area. The main course of the barbecue is oxymoronically soup, big bowls of Vietnamese noodle soup. The climax of the dream is my realization that the pho has spilled and saturated the newfangled carpeting.

When I got up this morning I discovered that a glass water bottle had shattered in my refrigerator -- it's an ancient, pre-frostless Westinghouse probably older than I am -- and drained onto the kitchen floor in a riverine pattern.

No Exit

Today was one of those Mondays when I feel more tired walking through the front door than when I left last Friday at 5 p.m.  How does this happen?  Was it Obama's speech at the vigil in Newtown?  The 49ers-Patriots game on Sunday Night Football?  My Lake Union Loop run earlier that Sunday?  Whatever it was I could tell my coworkers felt the same -- stunned to be back in front of one's computer monitor with a new week about to begin.

The thought that clouds my mind is, "Somewhere I've made a mistake.  I shouldn't be hear.  I've got to find a way out."  And then my mind answers itself, "Oh, well, now, come on.  Just hang in there and deal with it.  You can't get out now."

The whole day is like bone rubbing on bone.  Outside a cold wind announces winter is on its way.  I listen to PJ Harvey's "White Chalk" at lunch recalling that it was my preferred album for sleeping on the #101 bus when I worked in Renton.  I force myself through the day.  I try to get as much done as possible.  Because when in doubt, when you feel as if you are about to be suffocated by your job, there is always the work itself; that's where the only hope for solace is.