So who did I get along with at The Office of Financial Aid? Everybody if the criteria of getting alongmeans literally getting along, rather than the more colloquial usage of who you felt a connection with. No interpersonal drama between coworkers ever arose that summer. If we'd worked there long enough then something would've pop up for sure. But three months is just the amount of time to coop people up in a shared space Monday through Friday, and trick them into believing that they know each other better than they actually do.
You work a menial job, each of you doing the same thing, each of you intereplaceable by each oher, you bein to find it easy to talk trash about the job. About bosses. About the customers you're supposed to serve -- in this case students who needed money to attend university. You stop treating the customer like a customer and instead start treating yourself as the customer. What does this customer need in this scenario? Entertainment. A joke that causes you to chuckle, or an insight that makes you pause to think. You just want some sugar to sweeten up the otherwise droll passing of workdays. So you all start participating in this ongoing joke-making and joke-accepting musical chairs of shitting on the job.
It's easy to cozy up to coworkers during this phase. After all, you can agree on one thing. The job you work is not that bad, but it sucks. You hear some funny jokes and they become inside jokes. It's funny to laugh together, and you even look forward to laughing about it. Until the jokes get old, and you feel overdosed on sarcasm. You feel like you're walking on eggshells whenever you want to deviate out of the reservation of jokes about work and venture off into personal conversations.
In three months time we never got there. So we all left leaving that job thinking positively about each other. Anyways, even so, there were some people I did feel like I could've become good friends with there. Let met tell you about some of them. Through one of them I found out about the
The Red Notebook
.
that golden period of having an end date in mind to a social engagement, if the date was officially set or not.
befriending someone in a grocery aisle and sharing a joke, but being able to lose them in the rest of the store before it prolongs itself.
that happened to me this past weekend, where a woman i'd made a joke to continued with me down the aisle and kept pointing out different new products (this at trader joe's so to be fair it definitely has a lot of New Interesting Things the combos of which i'd not seen before). at a certain point... it was just too much ha
Can you write a novel about how you start with a joke at a grocery store aisle, but you keep going... never seperating... and then end up. becoming married?
befriending someone in a grocery aisle and sharing a joke, but being able to lose them in the rest of the store before it prolongs itself.
that happened to me this past weekend, where a woman i'd made a joke to continued with me down the aisle and kept pointing out different new products (this at trader joe's so to be fair it definitely has a lot of New Interesting Things the combos of which i'd not seen before). at a certain point... it was just too much ha