I hate office politics. I hate how stuff that has nothing to do with me, my work, or anything else, winds up affecting my life.

To wit: somebody in another department quit, but, in the process, stuff that my boss said about this guy’s boss got brought up and broadcast all over the place. Now my poor boss is persona non grata around here, and I think she might leave too. I mean, I don’t just imagine so – I have reason to think so.

Which means I’d have to adjust to a new boss. The main thing I have learned in my working life it’s that how well, or how poorly you do your job doesn’t matter nearly as much as the way people perceive you do your job. And that perception has as much to do with personality as it does with productivity.

This job I have is a little weird. I like to think of it as being way below my capabilities, though maybe it isn’t. After all, I’ve been through a lot. Maybe I really can’t handle much more than a few phone calls and clerical work. Maybe my greatest talent is that I’m polite. Maybe it’s best for me to just keep my head down, and, if necessary, kiss up to the new boss. After all, I show up, I do the work, and it’s hard for them to find somebody to work this shift.

If I were still here by myself at night, I think that’s what I’d do. But I’m not.

I don’t want to say bad things about my co-worker, especially since I mostly like her. But there are things she does which make her awfully hard to work with. She’s had a stroke, and I suspect that’s why she has an attitude of “immediacy” about everything. “Oh-my-God-there’s-an-error-message-on-my-computer! What-a-I-do! What-a-I-do!” or “Hey what does this term mean? Hey, Tea, what does this mean? Hellooooo! Hey B. I think Tea’s on the phone! What does this term mean?”

I also don’t think she has any idea how loud she is or how her voice carries.

For instance, I was on the phone doing an interview and I said to the applicant, “Will you please verify your social security number and date of birth”. When the applicant did, my co-worker, speaking to someone else yelled “You’re a liar!”

“Excuse me?” the applicant said.

“I didn’t say anything, sir. I believe you may have overheard my associate. She was speaking to someone else.”

I find that I’m much more tired at night when I go home, even though I have someone to share the work load with.

The boss said she wanted to “talk with me about her” – which lead me to hours of self examination about how I could be honest while trying to speak the way I hope someone would talk about me if I ever have the misfortune to be in the workforce post-stroke. Now, of course, the boss might not care anymore. I kind of hope she doesn’t.

So. We have a job board in our cafeteria. Or canteen. Or whatever you want to call it. It’s tables and chairs, vending machines and microwaves. I try to stay out of there, on account of I am on the run from the DHL man, with whom I made the mistake of having a friendly conversation and now he thinks I want to have some kind of extra-curricular ( extra-marital?) relationship with him. Why the DHL man is hanging around in our cafeteria for half an hour around my supper time every day is anybody’s guess. I figure he has a supervisor and I’m not it.

But I was down there long enough to see that there are trainee positions for a much higher profile, and much more challenging position within the company. They are hiring eight people. Presumably, these positions pay pretty well too, but, for me that’s a little bit beside the point. Once the larder is full, what else do you need? For me the draw would be the interesting work, and the respect. That’s my deadly sin, you know. Pride. I want to have what people of my parent’s generation call “a responsible job”. And, since I don’t have any children, I feel obligated to have a career.

Of course, the reason why they are willing to train people to do the work is that they haven’t been able to keep anybody in that department either. They keep quitting. I don’t know why – they say the hours are long. I suspect that the pay may be higher up the street somewhere.

I asked the boss about it, because you know there’d be no way to get a new person to sign off on me leaving a hard-to-fill-spot. She said she thought I’d be good at it. She said she’d sign off for me and say so on my behalf, so I resolved to apply. The HR person said you have to fill out the form on-line, and it struck me that might have been the first test, since it’s not real easy to find anything on our company’s web site. But I figured it out.

I was about to chicken out. I heard somebody else talking about how hard the application process was, that maybe there’s a math test, and the interview questions are all weird and designed to psych you out. I went out for a walk. Okay, maybe there’s a math test, but maybe you could pass it. Maybe it’s just functional math, or interpreting statistics or things you already do every day. And besides, the math can only be part of the process. If you fail, you fail. It’s not like you never failed a math test before. And if there’s that much math involved you wouldn’t like the job anyway, and there you go. Applying only means you’re checking it out. You owe it to yourself to at least check it out.

Then, I came in, and quickly printed off my form before I lost my nerve. Now it’s gone. The boss signed it, it’s moving up the food chain. Who knows what’ll happen next.

Why can’t everything just stay the same? Part of me feels like “there’s nothing wrong with trying to improve yourself”. The other part of me is like “why can’t you ever be satisfied?” Maybe I don’t think this job is secure. I don’t think I think any job is secure, and I should grab as much knowledge and as many skills as I can get.

Still, I wish I lived on a farm somewhere and had skills like growing tomatoes and making pies, and didn’t know that any other way of life existed.