That whole post below was meant to be an intro to the introspection I was doing after that boss chat. But, I got off on a bit of a separate direction.
The inside my head meanderings were about my last job and the number it most definitely did on the old psyche inner self. As I’ve written about here, and now mention on stage, the whole episode was a bad break up from the ultimate horror show pile of shit boyfriend.
Today, someone came to the office for a meeting/presentation. I’m the one they call when an outsider comes a-callling for our group. I set up the meeting, so why the fuck not, right?
So, I’m walking this dude from the lobby and chatting with him and explaining that I’ll set him up in a conference room and then round up the others and offering him a complimentary beverage and all that kind of thang. At heart I’m a polite person, generally minding my p’s and q’s, thank you very much, and on a good day I’m empathetic and intuitive enough to do the old Jesus thing and treat someone they way I might want, if I were entering a strange place and presenting a little talk.
(As an aside, so far every such lobby-getting, meeting chat has brought out that I just got here and barely know the place, followed by the “Where from?”/”Massachusetts” call and response. And it turns out, every fucking person in that universe has lived in Boston or Cambridge at some point in time. OK, not the other day, when it turned out the guy was from a neighboring suburb to my hometown.)
Anyway, I’m chatting and polite and making these people to home, and I can’t help but reflect on the psycho head trip my last employer laid at my doorstep. There was a recurring convo about how so and so “has a great administrator who’s really friendly and welcoming, I guess you couldn’t really be that kind of administrator, good thing you work here.” All a good-natured, chuckling rib about my ever so bitchy, icy, friendless, anti-social, bitter, angry, incapable of human contact self.
Yeah, kind of like the type of ex-boyfriend who reminds you you’re fat and ugly and couldn’t find another man.
Just like a chick who wises up and gets the restraining order, I am back to a self that doesn’t have the constant litany of stressful reminding of how much I suck. So, you know what, I wasn’t actually the weak link in the polite chain or the asshole after all. In fact, I’m betting that most everyone I’ve met so far out here has seen me as funny, engaging and all right to be around.
Sometimes I just want to call those motherfuckers up and tell them that life is better without the soul-crunching gig they made me feel like I was lucky to have.
Good advice for a bad breakup, though, is live well and leave it all behind.
By the by, and I mention it only for the symmetry of my hugely dysfunctional past work that is now a shitty memory, yesterday there was an all-staff meeting, roughly in size the same as some of the past departmental administrator sessions I used to loathe. The ones undoubtedly that gave an assist to my mental and actual undoing. The ones where I wrote in this space about a bad meeting being one where you couldn’t decide whether to stab the person talking or stab yourself just to get out of the room.
Anyway, same size meeting, sort of flip side process issues on the money giving or money getting sides. The difference? Pretty much everything said in yesterday’s meeting was on topic and not self-aggrandizing. What the fuck kind of place am I working? They can’t even do Dilbertesque meeting cliches.
Better yet, when one guy was caught getting asked a question off guard, he fully admitted to not having been paying attention at all and needing stuff repeated, including the question.
Who the fuck are these people with their openness, honesty and other anti-herd, bullshitless meeting behaviors.