something to mop up
May. 15th, 2009 12:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spintheiryarnsI don't know what happened, but for days I couldn't sleep-- I kept waking up like every hour. And now I've got a similar but opposite problem, namely that when I wake up in the morning I blink and boom, I've slept another hour. What the god, body, stop this.
Speaking of my body hating me, I had a pretty epically shitty Monday.
See, I took my job originally because I thought it would be nothing but sitting home and doing Photoshop work and not having to deal with people-- and then I started going into the office regularly and being given customer service and marketing work and okay, fine, I've done customer service at most of my previous jobs and I don't like it but I can tolerate it.
Except after five hours of being in meetings with my all-male coworkers throwing their privilege around (more on this later) and both my banks dicking me over in one afternoon it turned out that maybe I'm not as good at coping with people for extended periods of time as I thought I was. So I spent the last hour or so of my workday having a quiet little panic attack at my desk for no good reason at all and snapping at my coworker every time he tried to talk to me.
Yeah, I'm not so great with people IRL, surprise surprise. And BTW, brain, it would help a lot if you could not start pulling the epic-sound-sensitivity thing on me two weeks before I start school again, thank you kindly.
On the . . . not actually encouraging side, I phoned my mother so I could freak out at her, and she was able not only to calm me down but to help me figure out why my workday was so upsetting. Namely that I've mostly worked in female-dominated places before, and at the one exception the guys were jerks but at least not sexist jerks.
The guys I work with now-- and almost everyone I work with here is male-- aren't jerks, for the most part, but they are more privileged than I thought was actually possible. It started with the guy from another department who wanted to be "social" by hanging around my desk and asking me questions or, failing that, pulling up a chair and staring silently over my shoulder while I tried to work. When I mentioned this was making me uncomfortable, rather than actually caring what I thought, he just told me to stop being uncomfortable because clearly this solved everything.
Monday began with a friendly conversation with my new coworker/putative manager about how he thinks American culture has a "hangup" with separating our professional and personal lives and he doesn't understand it. I tried to explain that I felt that was a healthy division to make for reasons of both emotional health and personal safety, which he dismissed with "Well, I'm a tall guy so I guess I've never had to worry about stalkers. (In retrospect, I should have seen this as the shape of things to come.) Later that afternoon, there was a meeting in which my boss latched onto the idea of proving that there are real live human beings behind our website; he wants us to have a Facebook group with all our actual Facebooks attached to be freely browsed by all our thousands of customers.
Bear in mind that this is the same well-intentioned boss who, when he first asked me to answer voice mails from customers, wanted me to use my personal cell phone to do it.
I expressed concern about this idea; coworker went "Oh, right, I forgot you have issues I mean boundaries about your privacy, we'll make sure you're comfortable with things" and I think my opinion may have been soundly overruled while I was busy being offended by this. The fact that I'm female and have to worry about my personal safety more than you doesn't mean I have issues. Christ.
At this point, I'm really kind of sick of this; once or twice would be a fluke, but I feel like this is a clear pattern of half-a-dozen or so of my male coworkers deciding they're the arbiters of how I should feel about things. Which is really pretty offensive and upsetting, and I'm not sure what I should do about it. I'm not exactly non-confrontational; I would love to call these guys on their fail but I suck at confrontations and can never keep my head, and I'm afraid I won't be able to justify myself properly because they have expressed a willingness to accommodate me, they're just being really fucking patronizing about it.
So yeah, I'm not panicky for now but I'm upset and it sucks.
Speaking of my body hating me, I had a pretty epically shitty Monday.
See, I took my job originally because I thought it would be nothing but sitting home and doing Photoshop work and not having to deal with people-- and then I started going into the office regularly and being given customer service and marketing work and okay, fine, I've done customer service at most of my previous jobs and I don't like it but I can tolerate it.
Except after five hours of being in meetings with my all-male coworkers throwing their privilege around (more on this later) and both my banks dicking me over in one afternoon it turned out that maybe I'm not as good at coping with people for extended periods of time as I thought I was. So I spent the last hour or so of my workday having a quiet little panic attack at my desk for no good reason at all and snapping at my coworker every time he tried to talk to me.
Yeah, I'm not so great with people IRL, surprise surprise. And BTW, brain, it would help a lot if you could not start pulling the epic-sound-sensitivity thing on me two weeks before I start school again, thank you kindly.
On the . . . not actually encouraging side, I phoned my mother so I could freak out at her, and she was able not only to calm me down but to help me figure out why my workday was so upsetting. Namely that I've mostly worked in female-dominated places before, and at the one exception the guys were jerks but at least not sexist jerks.
The guys I work with now-- and almost everyone I work with here is male-- aren't jerks, for the most part, but they are more privileged than I thought was actually possible. It started with the guy from another department who wanted to be "social" by hanging around my desk and asking me questions or, failing that, pulling up a chair and staring silently over my shoulder while I tried to work. When I mentioned this was making me uncomfortable, rather than actually caring what I thought, he just told me to stop being uncomfortable because clearly this solved everything.
Monday began with a friendly conversation with my new coworker/putative manager about how he thinks American culture has a "hangup" with separating our professional and personal lives and he doesn't understand it. I tried to explain that I felt that was a healthy division to make for reasons of both emotional health and personal safety, which he dismissed with "Well, I'm a tall guy so I guess I've never had to worry about stalkers. (In retrospect, I should have seen this as the shape of things to come.) Later that afternoon, there was a meeting in which my boss latched onto the idea of proving that there are real live human beings behind our website; he wants us to have a Facebook group with all our actual Facebooks attached to be freely browsed by all our thousands of customers.
Bear in mind that this is the same well-intentioned boss who, when he first asked me to answer voice mails from customers, wanted me to use my personal cell phone to do it.
I expressed concern about this idea; coworker went "Oh, right, I forgot you have issues I mean boundaries about your privacy, we'll make sure you're comfortable with things" and I think my opinion may have been soundly overruled while I was busy being offended by this. The fact that I'm female and have to worry about my personal safety more than you doesn't mean I have issues. Christ.
At this point, I'm really kind of sick of this; once or twice would be a fluke, but I feel like this is a clear pattern of half-a-dozen or so of my male coworkers deciding they're the arbiters of how I should feel about things. Which is really pretty offensive and upsetting, and I'm not sure what I should do about it. I'm not exactly non-confrontational; I would love to call these guys on their fail but I suck at confrontations and can never keep my head, and I'm afraid I won't be able to justify myself properly because they have expressed a willingness to accommodate me, they're just being really fucking patronizing about it.
So yeah, I'm not panicky for now but I'm upset and it sucks.
