social situations

There’s something deeply heartbreaking about returning to work on the Monday after a vacation. It’s a lot like the Monday before you went on vacation, except that there’s no longer anything to look forward to. Even Christmas, which is only a month away, is ruined by the fact that my new workplace duties and responsibilities (paired with my current paycheck and title) start on the first of January.

I’m going to guess that the feeling - the Monday-after feeling - is created because during our string of days away from work, we forget the crappy things that we’ve gotten used to - our familiar daily routine. Perhaps before Thanksgiving I had almost unknowingly resigned myself to a life of spreadsheets and faking smiles but now, after five days of gravy-filled freedom, spreadsheets seem impossible to return to. You know, I feel like an abused kid who isn’t that upset about his childhood until the moment he discovers what he’s been missing out on: candy, go-carts, love.

Today made me wonder: is work usually this bad, or does it seem worse because yesterday I watched five hours of football and ate four different kinds of meat? I’m not sure. As I read an email from my boss informing me that my new second boss, whose wanton use of emoticons I find unsettling, would be calling me to teach me how to “do totals in Excel,” I wasn’t quite so sure. Perhaps today was a perfect storm of things I hate. Perhaps I hate way, way too many things. Perhaps, in exchange for learning something I already know - namely, how to “do totals in Excel,” I could teach my new boss the word “sum.”

On the other hand, my job paid for that Thanksgiving gravy, and for the apartment that sheltered me, and for the cable that allowed me to watch a Lifetime Movie Network marathon that included Too Young to be a Dad and The Truth About Jane. These facts lead me to believe that my job is a necessary evil in my life and, therefore, something that should be ignored to the very best of my ability.

I think I’ve taken some important steps toward this goal of apathy and sliding by in my passionless job, but I’d like to cover more and more ground in the weeks and months to come - it’s actually surprisingly hard to let go of competitiveness and perfectionism and drive. And I’d of course be thrilled if you’d like to join me as long as you have a job where you are treated kind of like a really high-end photocopying machine.

My first step is to stop checking my work email from home under any circumstances. I’ve just trashed the link to the Outlook site on my home computer. I won’t give any more time to work beyond the hours that I am paid for - no extra time at work and no extra time thinking or reading about work. And if you’re thinking that you’d get fired if you stopped staying late or if you didn’t check your messages at night, I think you better start looking for a different crappy job from the one you’ve got.

In summation, tomorrow’s Tuesday - the day that’s exactly like Monday except for the fact that you’re less rested and that you don’t have to give a one-sentence summary of your weekend to everyone who politely asks so that they can then talk about theirs. I’m going to try to go in to work an embrace my totally mediocre and apathetic attitude. And I’m really, really excited about doing an outstanding job at it.

Here’s a pet peeve of mine that keeps popping up today (thanks, corporate job!): people who say they are sorry and think that that is enough. “I’m sorry” is not a magic phrase that erases past wrongdoing as well as any residual guilt or consequences. They are just meaningless words.

For example, one of my coworkers often apologizes for her noise level. And yet, despite these various “I’m sorries,” she doesn’t stop the activities that bother me. She’ll even say “I’m sorry” during an ongoing offence. What does this accomplish other than her acknowledging that she is being rude? And how am I supposed to react to a meaningless apology? “Thanks for letting me know that you care that you are bothering me, rather than that you don’t care that you are bothering me, regardless of whether or not you will stop bothering me.”

Many times, I feel like “I’m sorry” is more for the person who wronged instead the person wronged - like it’s an easy way to clear their conscience, and also an excuse for any future conflicts - “I don’t know why he’s still upset! I said I was sorry!”

So how should you say sorry when you really mean it? By either 1) trying to fix what went wrong or 2) if you can’t fix it, offering some sort of compensation (and I’m not talking about flowers). Also, “I’m sorry” should not just mean that you regret that bad things have passively happened, it should mean that you take accountability for what happened.

It works in all aspects of our lives - Jet Blue is a good example. After struggling with horrible customer service and delay issues in the last few years, they have a bunch of new policies that, while they don’t erase the chronic problems of air travel, have you understand that they are sorry for these problems. Instead of saying “I’m sorry” and letting delay, overbooking, and cancellation problems persist, they wrote a “Customer Bill of Rights” that not only made them take responsibility for their mistakes, but also was a step toward fixing mistakes in the future.

My boss is another good example. Whenever she says she’s sorry about something, it comes with a clear, related action that either fixes the problem, will prevent the problem from happening again, or, if the first two aren’t possible, makes me feel better and restores my confidence in her. Not only does it make me want to do the best work that I can for her, but it also makes me mirror her actions with others. And, as you might guess, she’s not the kind of person who has to say she’s sorry often - perhaps because she’s already pretty on top of things.

Ben, who has said “I’m sorry” maybe twice in his life, has a similar approach. He skips the niceties of the formal apology and simply fixes the problem or changes his future behavior. He’s not one to just say “I’m sorry” to get out of a conflict.

In any case, I’m going to pay more attention to how I deal with conflicts that I’m involved in where I’m at fault. No more “I’m sorry.” From here on out, I’m sticking with, “I’m sorry, and here’s what I’m going to do about it.”

I have trouble finding the right way to have conversations about books. Book clubs usually bother me. And while getting my MFA, the three required 500-level literature seminars I took probably rank among the least favorite and most useless hours of my entire life. Literature classes are too much about showing off, about making other people in the class feel bad, about assuming that the author and his work fit perfectly into certain genres, time periods, and trends. Literature classes too often assume that any book read in a literature class is perfect and that the author knew exactly what he or she was doing with every single word. Not to mention that literature classes are usually way too serious and seriously boring.

On the other hand, book clubs suffer from different but equally bad problems. Too often the discussion disintegrates into emotional reactions - like which characters we liked or didn’t like, as if these characters really existed. Too often after that, the conversation too quickly deteriorates into talking about boys or shoes. Usually, these book clubs take place in quaintly quirky coffee houses with mismatched chairs, $5 espressos, and music that is just a little cooler than the music you listen to. Without exception, these coffeehouses have punny names like “The Daily Grind” or “Not Your Average Joe” or “See You Latte.”

So, you can imagine my horror yesterday, walking to a tea house called “Subtle Tea” to meet with my work-related book club for the first time. As I walked into the place, esoteric trip-hop music on the stereo (which was a just little cooler than my music ) and Mac laptops covering every flat surface (way, way cooler than my Mac laptop), my hopes were not high. Even though I wanted to talk about the book, I wasn’t sure I was ready to be disappointed again. You might even say I was filled with a deep Apa Tea.

But what followed, to my delight, was a pretty intelligent and fun discussion of the book we read (it was Marisha Pessl’s “Special Topics in Calamity Physics - you can read my review here). No one got interrupted, no one talked too much, no one said “semiotic” or “paradigm” or “post post modern.” Someone brought chocolate.  

It reminded me that, even though most organized book-talking sessions go wrong somehow, getting to talk about what you’re reading with a diverse group of people is something to work toward, even if it means sitting within earshot of a hipster knitting circle discussing skinny jeans. Not only do you get to ask questions and hear about totally different and interesting readings of the book, but I also find myself reading the book more closely before the discussion and getting more out of it. The whole thing filled me with hope and got me totally excited about next month’s book, Ian McEwan’s Atonement.

After the meeting, I met my friend Amanda and we got talking about books, too - a new short story writer she’s discovered, her first experience with Dos Passos. And when I got home, I talked with Ben about the short story I read on the train that he had recommended. Here I was thinking that I never get to talk about books, when really I spent the whole night doing it with one person or another, in one way or another.

My friends, I suppose, make up a more loose-knit un-official book club - we often borrow and lend books to each other, argue over this or that author, talk about this or that review or trend. And I think that’s just as rewarding and just as important. I supposed the only difference is that our book club meets in bars. Bars with more straightforward names like “Cheap Shots” and “Why Not?”

Either way, I’m glad I now have both venues.

Once a month, my company sends out mass emails alerting professors about new texts in their fields. Part of my job is answering anyone who writes back with requests, questions, and concerns. Usually I can expect to reply to a few hundred emails in the days following a mailing. And while 99% of these emails are from considerate, helpful, understanding professors (who get helpful, considerate, understanding replies from me), every once and again someone is just plain mean.

This one, which I received today, concerned a professor whose name accidentally had a note written next to it in the email we sent him (Move To Hum means move to the humanities mailing list):

You can’t really believe that my name is “Professor Smith Move To Hum,” can you? If you want my response, address me correctly. TS

It was the afternoon, and I was probably on email 200 for the day. Why did this guy have to be so mean? Did he know a real person answered these emails, a real person who didn’t deserve such condescending treatment? As usual when I receive emails like this, I write a mean response back, erase it, and then write an overly-polite, cowering apologetic email that I begrudgingly send. But this time I sent the first one:

Hi Professor Smith Move to Hum

Sorry for the mix-up… as you might guess, this is a computer-generated email list. However, the data comes from somewhere and that somewhere is ME - a hardworking woman with a useless graduate degree who has a pretty sad and monotonous data-entry job. And, as a person who answers hundreds of these emails a day even though she wishes for better things in life, please give me a break when something goes a little wrong - at least be nice when alerting me to a problem. Or do you not ever make mistakes?

Anyway, I’m guessing from the note on your files that you’re a humanities professor and not a history professor. If that’s the case let me know and I’ll move you to the correct mailing list and, who knows, I might even correct your name.

After I pressed SEND I quietly waited to be fired. But nothing happened except that the guy (his name has been changed, of course) wrote back a few hours later.

I apologize. Thanks for your reply. Please keep me on the history list. TS

Then I guess I felt a little bad, too. Maybe I had caught in a bad moment or during a bad day. Maybe he, too, was in the middle of a thankless task that made him cranky. On the other hand, maybe he simply never really thought about how customer service people might want to be treated as people, too. That they might need even more humanity than people who don’t answer spam emails on a regular basis for their paycheck.

It’s like people who yell at telemarketers - why would you do that? Do these angry, yelling people think that it was that specific person’s idea to call people up all day one after another and bother them? No. No one likes being a telemarketer. They’re just trying to get by. And if the best they can do is be a telemarketer, let’s be extra nice to them, because things have probably not been going their way.

Sometimes little events take place in my day that seem to refer to each other - that shed light on each other. It happened yesterday: I attended a literary reading for the first time in over a year and had a lot of conflicting thoughts about it. Then, upon arriving home, I found that Ben had bought the 2007 copy of Best American Short Stories, which contained a forward about the state of the short story by this year’s editor (and one of my favorite writers) Stephen King.

It was as if the essay was saying, “Confused about your feelings regarding the reading tonight? Here, let me explain.”

I attended the reading because my friend Amanda (you can read her blog here, or look at her comics here) was a part of it. She read three new, short pieces, and was the only reader of five that showed energy, life and had things happen in her stories. Of course, I’m biased.

But the readers and what they read wasn’t really what I was concerned about, so much as I was troubled about the state of readings in general. They tend to be too long, they tend to be filled with friends and relatives of the writers (usually also writers themselves) and no one else. But was that what was bothering me? I couldn’t put my finger on it - there was just something icky I felt about it.

Like how, before the reading started, I listened to a conversation behind me. A woman writer said, ”You know, for a long time I was tortured by that saying, writers write, but in the last couple of years I’ve come to understand that there are other things in life that I have to work on before I can return to the page.”

Enter Stephen Kings’ essay, which was weirdly sitting on the coffee table when I returned home:

“What’s not so good is that writers write for whatever audience is left. In too many cases, that audience happens to consist of other writers and would-be writers who are reading the various literary magazines (and The New Yorker, of course, the holy grail of the young fiction writer) not to be entertained but to get an idea of what sells there. And this kind of reading isn’t real reading, the kind where you just can’t wait to find out what happens next (think “Youth,” by Joseph Conrad, or “Big Blonde,” by Dorothy Parker). It’s more like copping-a-feel reading. There’s something yucky about it.”

Yes, Stephen King! I said icky and you said yucky! The only difference is that you could actually articulate formed ideas to support your feelings! Thank you!

He goes on:

“Last year, I read scores of stories that felt … not quite dead on the page, I won’t go that far, but airless, somehow, and self-referring. These stories felt show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers. The chief reason for all this, I think, is that bottom shelf. It’s tough for writers to write (and editors to edit) when faced with a shrinking audience.”

Which brings me back to the reading last night, as I listened to a poem that was about a poet attending a poetry reading. King had pegged the feeling that I had - that I was copping a feel for the competition. That I was hearing stories written for writers, self-conscious rather than gloriously open. That I was looking at the shrinking audience of these events and I was one of them - sort of bored, sort of curious, sort of jealous, sort of desperate to succeed and looking for hints. I wasn’t there to be entertained and they weren’t there to entertain me (except for Amanda). We were all there to feel better about ourselves.

Later that night as we were going to sleep, I talked to Ben about it - Ben who has always been notoriously anti-literary-reading. We listed the readings we’d been to and enjoyed (we probably attended two or three a week while in graduate school) and didn’t come up with many. Really, I remembered my favorite “readings” weren’t readings at all - like the time Jim Shepard gave a close reading of the short story “Emergency” by Denis Johnson or the time Andrew Greer gave a technical lecture on craft. These were writers talking about other writers that they respected.

And as much as I like both of these writers’ work, reading their work is something I prefer to do alone in my sweatpants. More than that, reading their work is something I can do when they are not around. Shouldn’t we take advantage of what these people know instead of having them read something that’s in print already?

Writers talking about writing - not only does it seem more interesting and honest than writers reading their writing for other writers - but it also might just be part of what’s ailing the short story these days. Yes, we’re faced with a shrinking audience and the bottom shelves at the bookstore.  But the answer is not to hold readings in coffee shop basements - like kids that are forming their own club because they weren’t let into some other, better club - but to work together and talk about the gloriously open writers, the writers who have stumbled upon something.

We need to forget that we are scared of not making it and just entertain one another. To have fun with the tools we have. More than that, we need to take off our hipster outfits, put on some sweatpants, and write. No matter what you hear at readings, Writers write.

You can read Stephen Kings’ full essay here, as it was published in the New York Times Sunday Book Review a few weeks go.

I read a lot of stuff about how to get ahead at work, about how to be a team player or get promoted. And that’s all well and good if you’re in the field you want to be in and generally happy about what you do. But I want to put something out there more along the lines of How to Eke By or How to Barely Keep Receiving a Paycheck. You know, advice for the many, many people out there who have jobs that they aren’t happy with, jobs that are condescending, jobs that feel like sitting in waiting room for eight hours a day, hoping for something better.

In a lot of ways, I like my job. It pays the rent, it doesn’t tire me out, and I have a wonderful manager who understands me. But in a lot of other ways my job is slowly killing my soul. I waste time and energy on things I don’t care about, I sit on my ass in a box all day, and I get an unhealthy, warped idea of what money is supposed to mean to me.

Over the year or so that I’ve worked this office job, though, I think I’ve picked up on a lot of great ways to slide by. It’s a pretty complicated formula involving keeping your boss content, avoiding social contact, and being utterly invisible to middle management. It’s a delicate mixture of passive-aggression and gold old regular aggression.

Today’s advice concerns the Evil Administrative Assistant in my office. As you can tell, we don’t really get along and never have. He brings passive aggressiveness to heights that even I find frightening and is also a bit anal retentive. He tends to pick favorites and hold grudges. He’s my manger’s manager’s assistant, which, in his warped mind, makes him one rung higher on the ladder, even though we are both assistants, also known as Doers of Menial Tasks.

He orders around the marketing assistants and I often get emails from him asking me to tidy my office or tidy my mangers office or the tidy marketing supply rooms (I am organized but certainly not tidy). He’s one of those people who will “suggest” you do a certain list of things and then get angry if you don’t act on his “suggestions.” Then he’ll “suggest” you take his suggestions. And so on.

He’s also the guy who is charge of ordering office supplies and filling out technology forms for the group, and he takes these lame responsibilities very seriously — in a Dwight-like manner. I once went weeks without packing tape, perhaps because I didn’t want to small talk with him about musicals.

(Aside: EAA isn’t as bad as I’m making him out to be. He’s just someone in my office who tells me to do things, which I hate. To tell the truth, I’m not exactly a joy to work with either, as one might imagine. He’s really mostly a normal guy with good intentions. His biggest trespass is simply having to work with me.)

Now, my goals in this situation are to A) avoid speaking with the Evil Administrative Assistant face to face at all costs and B) avoid tidying anything, ever, and, even more importantly C) avoid being asked to tidy things, even if they are only suggestions.

So. A few weeks ago I devised a plan based on simple stimulus/response conditioning. Every time I needed EAA to complete a task for me (order boxes, fill out a report, sign something) I held onto it, waiting patiently. Then, as soon as I received a ridiculous request from EAA to tidy something (or not wear ripped jeans or to be civil to the new person “for at least a week”), I would immediately barrage him with all of my saved up requests at once - just like ringing a little bell.

It’s really as simple as making a dog drool: I connected in EAA’s mind emailing a task to me with his having to do several tasks for me. I do the same thing to him when he drops by my cube with “suggestions.” He’ll suggest that I look for a new place to keep my supplements and I jump on him with a suggestion to clean out the marketing closet around the corner. It’s Psychology 101, and this time I’m not cutting to play video games.

Sure, I’m using punishment as a conditioning behavior instead of reward, which we learned in Psych 101 was a bad way to condition children. But this guy isn’t a child, he’s a gown (evil) man. And, dear reader, I haven’t had to tidy anything in weeks. Let’s just hope I don’t run out of packing tape.

You know those dreams you have where you’re at some meeting at work and you’re delivering this really great speech about a work-related topic in a clever way that no one has thought about before, but then you start noticing that everyone is looking at you strangely? And then you start to stumble over your words and your eyes fly from one coworker to the next and finally down onto yourself and your naked? But then you wake up?

I went through something on the same mortification level this weekend, except for the waking up part.

I was in the grocery store on Saturday morning and everything was going normally. I collected a big basket of food items and headed to the checkout lines. It was the weekend and busy and I had to wait a pretty long time to get to the front. As the woman is scanning my groceries and putting them in bags, I reach into my satchel and find… nothing. No wallet, no keys, no phone, no credit cards.

My mind flashes back to the night before, when I cleverly placed my vital satchel items into a smaller purse before we went on a walk. “I’m so clever,” I remembered thinking to myself. “This purse is much smaller and lighter than my normal satchel, and will therefore be easier and more comfortable to carry on a walk.”

Back in line at the grocery store, I rooted around in my satchel looking for anything that might help me. Finally, among the gum wrappers and pen caps, I find my rarely-used checkbook. I think that I’m saved, until the cashier tells me she needs to see my drivers’ license (vital item located in small clever purse) or my PathMark Membership Card (item attached to vital item keychain in small clever purse).

I tell her that I’ve forgotten my wallet, that I don’t have any money, and she looks at me as if I were telling her a bald-faced lie. I ask if she can type in my phone number, but by this point the long line behind me has lost their patience. The man directly behind me utters the most horrible thing a stranger can say: “COME ON LADY!”

It’s at this point that I check to see if I’m wearing clothes. After the initial COME ON LADY other people in line start to yell. Then the cashier asks me what she’s supposed to do with my groceries and has to void all of the sales. I’m trying to explain why I’m such an idiot, I try to tell them that I’ve been to the grocery store successfully thousands of times without incident and actually I’m really good at grocery stores, but really I mostly start to tear up and babble something about my vital items.

I rush home, cry at Ben for a few minutes (who can’t help but ask where my groceries are), collect my vital satchel items, and then have to go to the grocery store again because we need food. This time I get in a different line, as if that were the problem. 

But it was really just like those anxiety dreams where for a long time after you wake up, you feel unsure of yourself and skittish and defensive. It was actually weekend-ruining. I didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything or answer the phone. I just wanted to barricade myself in the apartment, not buying things or running into people who might call me LADY.