Work has taken on a surreal quality of inefficiency lately - I will not publicly explain why - but a new coping strategy occurred to me over the 4-day weekend, and it worked pretty well today.
I've decided I'm in a sitcom or a reality show. This is all being taped, and they're going to be broadcasting my reactions nationwide. So I don't want to be an ass. I want to appear witty, efficient, good-hearted, wise.
Sounds like the beginnings of a new book on workplace behavior . . .
ReplyDeleteMy workplace actually video monitors all of us (inside "smoke detectors"). Our cubicles have been chopped down to desk height so we haven't privacy to blow our noses. Our computers and phones are monitored. One can furtively check a smartphone for email or comments on a blog, if one gets the lines of sight right...:) Just because they're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you...
ReplyDeleteEvery day I tell myself "If it were fun, they wouldn't have to pay us..." Hell of an attitude...Or just blast Dylan "Twenty years of school and then they put you on the day shift..."
What's that mantra "Fake it until you make it". Sounds like cognitive behavioral therapy to me.
ReplyDeleteWord verification is dragu!
And what would the name of this reality show be?
ReplyDeleteAnd...is it one where you have to scheme and plot against your fellow cast-mates in the hopes that your the last man standing?
Now that would be fun to watch!
;-)
"you're"
ReplyDeleteRetriever, we'll be watching for you in the fall lineup of new reality shows.
ReplyDeleteTerri, I have long fantasized exactly that.
"Word verification is dragu!"
ReplyDeleteThe blogspot one is pretty convenient vs the others. The other ones you can't even recognize what the letters are some of the time.
It always helps to take a more proactive and less defensive reaction to external stimuli. If you treat bothersome people as if they are children and don't expect anything good to come from them, you're basically redefining your relationship with them.
So long as you treat them as your peers, their opinions matter disproportionately to you and affect you disproportionately as well. You also get annoyed whenever they don't meet your expectations or have mood swings that then end up affecting you because you'd thought they could handle it by themselves.
The only drawback to seeing yourself as responsible for the pack of miscreants is that your official authority doesn't invest you with the actual power to go along with that self-anointed authority. That just means you have to take unofficial channels.
Since the November 2008 election, I've often felt that I had awoken in some kind of alternate universe dreamed up by Monty Python. :(
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