An interesting point I'm coming to notice about myself is that while I am one of the most extroverted people I know, I like to deal with people on my terms. Which is why, at the end of the day, I start feeling anti-social towards the people who bother me at work. No, not my friends who come to bother me at work... but the customers and potential customers who actually do bother me at work.
You see, I've been criticized frequently in the past by my more amicable and socially conscious friends for intentionally excluding those with whom I do not get along. In short, given a chance to interact with 15 people, I will befriend those who are intelligent (insofar as my prejudiced gauge of intelligence goes, anyhow), entertaining, and at least marginally socially adjusted and will begin to, almost subconsciously, attempt to alienate the people whose combined indices of annoying and stupid eclipse my preset tolerance for such things. Ideally, I am left with a group of people who I really like to be around and have managed to evacuate the area of people who I really hate being around. If you've ever seen me in action, you have to admit I'm pretty good at it. Probably not something I should be proud of... but it works... much to the irritation of my wife.
In any event, the problem with work is that, no matter how annoying customers are, you just can't go running them off. They're paying you money, after all... and that's a big part of actually doing business. Now, I'm lucky in my particular business in that stupid usually has a very low shelf life in my store. The corollary to stupidity is that someone who knows almost nothing about everything usually hasn't specialized all of his handful of brain cells into any one thing... usually. The rare exception to this corollary gives me more headaches than you will ever know.
But yeah, so stupid and annoying come into my store on a fairly regular basis... and I can't drive them off. This typically results in an increase in my angst and a decrease in my social nature, to the point that when I get off of work, I usually just want to lash out and stab someone. I still want to see my friends... but I really don't want to deal with anyone outside of that group.
Cynic the misanthrope... go figure.
Posted by Vengeful Cynic at February 7, 2006 08:00 AM | TrackBack