I'm currently locked in a bitter and frustration war of attrition against the other receptionist in my office, and I'm losing. Like most wars, this one is ugly, childish, seemingly unending, and could have been avoided if office boundaries had been maintained.
It started with small things, magnifying every little mistake I made. Suddenly I couldn't write legibly enough. I was not handling the parking validations correctly. I was forbidden to snack at the desk because my munching was "unprofessional." "Your hair color is unprofessional", is what I wanted to say.
I woke up late one day and didn't have time to shave. "I know you like your stubble" she said, not making eye contact, "but we have to look presentable".
So what happened?
Everything was pretty good up until about a month ago. We had always been polite, even friendly with each other. Even though she is about twice my age, we have very little in common, and she has throaty cackle for laugh, we worked reasonably well together. While we worked, about three feet away from each other, we were mostly silent, pretending not to see what was on the other's computer monitor. When we did talk we commented on the weather, the Lakers poor performance from the previous night, how we wished it was Friday, and that's it! Classic, boring workplace small talk that makes the world turn and keeps everyone happy.
But she was also gossipy, and often dished on the legal secretaries, attorneys, staff, everyone.
And as it turned out, she couldn't leave well enough alone. She wanted to be friends. She started asking all kinds of unnecessary questions, about my personal life and relationships. I would answer them to the extent which I deemed appropriate. My responses to these questions were brief ("No I don't have a girlfriend", "I'm not sure who I'm voting for", "I was raised Catholic"). I bobbed and weaved as best I could, offering perfectly reasonable deflections that any normal person would have picked up on. I had no interest in elevating small talk into medium talk
But as I returned to reading Deadspin she would sit looking at me, almost anxiously, clearly wondering why I hadn't asked her any questions about her life. So she continued pressing, and then one day she must have decided she was tired of waiting.
"So my crazy ex-boyfriend called me last night."
"What was that?" I asked. I was in the middle of georgraphy-related Sporcle game.
"I said I had this crazy boyfriend", she said, a bit more grating this time.
"Oh really?"
"He would bring me flowers every day and be like 'Baby I love you'. He was very clingy. And you know I'm the type of person that needs to, you know, have my own space. So I would go out with my girlfriends without him and he would get all upset and be calling me and calling me. He'd show up at my house, I would have to call the police. I dumped him. I don't do clingy. I need to do my own thing. That's why I married so late."
"I see"
"It was hard, because you know people say getting married at 36 was old. People judge, you know. I couldn't just be tied down to one guy. I was young! Like you! You know what I mean! RIGHT?!", she cackled.
"Yup." I smiled. She waited for me to speak, but instead I slowly swiveled my chair the other way and continued my Sporcle game.
Not the coolest thing I've ever done, blowing her off like that. I'm sure someone closer to her age and gender would be more willing to chit-chat about past relationships and personal lives. Female-male workplace boundaries are easily the most rigid, and "ex-boyfriends" is not a topic I'm interested under most circumstances. Also I forgot to pause my Sporcle timer, so I didn't have time for a conversation about social norms.
Here's a story: my roommate does social media for a TV network. They were promoting their new channel in Africa on Facebook, and a post came in accusing one of their company's employees, let's call him Charlie, of being into hardcore strange BDSM sex fetishes, passing along his user ID for a related website. My roommate quickly deleted the post, assuming it was false. But when he brought it up to Charlie, the guy sheepishly admitted to everything! To be fair, it's not like Charlie was doing anything wrong or illegal. But something that should always be personal was made public, and now every time my roommate sees Charlie he imagines him with a gag in his mouth and a fuzzy handcuffs on his wrists.
So because I didn't want to listen to her crazy boyfriend story she turned on me. This has been going on for a while now, and though my job performance has probably improved, the tension is really hard to ignore. Sometimes we revert back to our standard small talk and things get better, but for whatever reason she still wants to know the real me, which is flattering but not likely. I want to avoid a Charlie scenario by any means necessary, and if that means I have to take a little abuse so be it.
Maybe I should be more appreciative. But maybe she should also lay off my facial hair.
OFFICE BOUNDARIES>EVERYTHIN
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