shant, and you can’t make me! pouts
I hate that attitude that you’re anti social cos you don’t go to every goddamn thing they have planned. Where I work, it’s not so bad - we aren’t expected to attend anything - in fact the management doesn’t organise anything at all so it’s fine to opt out. For instance, I didn’t attend that last 2 Christmas parties… they are just awful and all that enforced jollity just sets my teeth on edge.
As to breaks and lunches, I started taking them at my desk about 18 months ago. I am told (from my co-worker who does keep my informed as to the gossip) that there was some talk about it but I had just started a diet so she said it was because I wanted to be good about what I eat. In reality, I just couldn’t bear conversations about other people toilet training their kids or where you can get a few pence off the price of a tin of beans - sorry but my world doesn’t revolve around that stuff. No offence to these people but why am I considered anti social if I opt out of such conversations? As I have no burning need to buy beans and don’t have kids, I’m excluded from the majority of conversations anyway - and I’m considered anti-social??? Get a grip.
Thank god our management don’t have a team work attitude - otherwise I’d really be up shit creek without a paddle :D.
If this were a team, I’d probably be elected Captain (but I wouldn’t accept). I excel at Not Playing Well With Others. Which is odd, because I really like playing. Check any of my threads, if you doubt me. It’s probably because, like many of the previous poster, I don’t see work as play. It’s a job. I wouldn’t do it, if they weren’t paying me.
And, there is no team. Teams, except in professional sports, have loyalty to one another. They do not hire people whose only job is to squeeze their “team members” right up to, but not past, if possible, the breaking point. Companies, these days, make it clear that they owe their employees nothing but a paycheck. No other consideration. Fine. That’s all the contract calls for. Just don’t expect anything extra from me. Fair’s fair.
I refuse to suck up. I can (and do) knock the spin off of just about any statement they care to make. I don’t buy bullshit, just because it’s The Company Position. I point out when they’re being inconsistent or abusive of the employer/employee relationship.
I do not suffer fools, gladly, either. If a coworker asks me the same question five times, I will make sure they feel like the fool they are (if they’re capable of it), as I answer the question. I’m very tolerant of genuine ignorance (I won’t get banned for saying that, will I?), but I have no patience for stupidity.
At my last review, all my boss could find to say about the previous year was that “You get the job done.” Like that was a bad thing. He seemed to be upset that there wasn’t more he could say. So upset that he repeated the above phrase at least four times. I wanted to ask what else he thought I SHOULD be doing. Isn’t that what he hired me to do? Fool!
And, I’m not going to ANYONE’s birthday party until they start having one for EVERYONE. Fat chance! It just makes me want to puke when they make a huge deal out of one or two people’s birthday’s, and ignore all the others.
I find that most people assume that a quiet solitary person is thinking bad things about other people. So, if I am perceived as solitary, I take time to reassure these paranoid extroverts that I enjoy their company, think they’re funny and smart, and notice the good work they do.
I don’t tell them that their endless yapping about their sister’s operation, their walk through the mall yesterday, and their prying into Bill’s sex life are stupid and boring. They will never understand this, so I try to ease their sense of rejection (poor babies) when they notice that I’m not socializing with them all the time.
Greetings, fellow ITs, Greens, Field-Independents, Analyticals, and every other way we’ve been categorized by every workplace-quiz out there!
I, too, do not Play Well With Others, and never have. I also have difficulty Working Well With Others unless they are focused on the task at hand. If it’s about the job, we can do it, and it gets done efficiently and well. If it’s about the personalities, nope, doesn’t happen.
This is both a blessing and a curse as a high school teacher. On the one hand, we are expected to work in academic “teams” as well as departments. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible to spend your entire day in the classroom and not have to talk to any of your coworkers except the ones on your hallway, with whom you have passing duty. I don’t hang out in the teacher’s lounge, but that’s not seen as odd, since there are three in the building and they’re all claimed by departments other than mine.
My immediate boss has chosen to deal with this by making me team leader. This works very well for him, since it means that any job he assigns the team will be completed and has a 95% chance of being completed on time, since 19 times out of 20 I will throw my hands in the air and do it myself. It also means that there’s slightly less stress on me, ironically enough, since as team leader I can do that - as a team member, I’d turn in my part on time and then watch the project slide into oblivion. OTOH, it means I have deveolped a reputation this year as a terrible nag, partially because of that 20th time when I refused to do it myself - the project was a team test that, since I’m the Pre-AP teacher for our team, was for a unit my kids had already completed. The ordinary members of the team - overworked as they are - were bad enough, but the coach who also happens to teach algebra thinks he’s the gods’ gift to the school and was personally offended that I kept asking him to to what he’d said he would do . . .
If I’m lucky, next year I’ll get Calculus and the team will just be me and one other guy. Who is not a coach. Thank Jove.
::raises hand semi-distractedly::
Um, yeah, I agree with that person over there, the OP, whatever her name is. I come in and get immersed in my work. I like interacting with you folks as long as the interaction pertains to the database and how you use it, new things you want it to do, bugs you’ve noticed, and any questions you might have about how to use it to do your daily tasks. When I’m not interacting with you, I’m either interacting with the database structure or I’m browsing the Straight Dope or reading my email or eating or looking at pretty pictures.
I don’t want to put money in an envelope towards the purchase of lottery tickets. I don’t want to bet on the outcome of the Buffalo Bobs or the Ramjets or whoever/whatever that sports stuff you’re talking about.
I have the good fortune to be the only one in the company who does what I do, task-wise, so I’m not part of anyone’s “team”. Not to be unfriendly, I’m not just not immersed in what you’re immersed in and I only need to know about it if it affects what I do. Hey, wanna see my field definitions? I just did this cool calc field that abstracts out the modifier of a subset of fields from this or the child file and uses the login name as its referent. No? Eyes glazing over? ::shrugs:: OK, call me if you’re having any problems with the system.
I don’t play well with others either.
I’m inflexible when it comes to important things. I like doing things my way, as it’s always better than the way others do it 
I’m not currently employed, but when I was, I wasn’t interested in anything that was outside work hours. The rest of the group going to the pub for an hour or two after work ? Oh, have fun, I’m going home. Lunch breaks I took on my own whenever possible, and cut short if I got stuck with two many people. I’d rather be back at my desk getting more work done than socialising with coworkers.
I’m currently studying full time. Even though I live in easy travelling distance to three or four universities, I’m studying by correspondence. I like it that way
I was just given the nightshift at my job as well. I am the only one on my shift. I work in a hotel on an Air Force Base. At that hour of the night there is nobody checking in, nobody checking out and I don’t have to hear anybody bitching and complaining. I sit in an office chair all day; I make about one reservation per night. I sit in that chair, read novels, and study for clep tests. Military life is treating me pretty nicely for now.
Chiming in as an anti-social bastard at work. It’s mainly because I can’t stand mundane and pointless small talk. Not even a little bit. I don’t give a crap about your latest take on the weather, don’t follow any local sports teams, and reserve my political talk for gatherings with friends.
Lunch is spent reading a book.
Breaks are spent reading a book.
Even the occasional staff meeting is spent reading a book. It’s not that I don’t like them, it’s just that I prefer to do my job and go home.
I’m an only child. What do you think? Only child philosophy: ‘Hmm, there is a crowd of people doing stuff over there. So I’ll just sit at the completely opposite side of the room and do something completely different.’
Hell, I used to be more sociable than I am. But then I discovered GU talk and the Straight Dope. Now my RL conversations can never match the depth and humour of anything I read online. Sad but true.
I do play well with others, always get the “team-oriented” notation on my review and such. But I tend to identify with Not Playing Well With Other Folks. I think the thing is, I have learned to “play” extroverts pretty well – a very good way of keeping them out of your hair, since they don’t tend to worry about what you’re thinking so much.
FranticMad has the gist of it – feed them some kind of line about how wonderful you think they are and don’t express your opinion of their incessant blahblahblah and they’ll feel more comfortable with you.
Just because you are introverted doesn’t mean you can’t use your powers of analysis to keep the bastids at bay.
I think I’m in a similar position. My department is full of little cliques where you know well in advance which manager will assign which consultants to their clients. You know exactly who’s “in” and who’s “out”. I’m in the latter group, but still valued because – unlike some others – I’ll actually deliver what I’m asked to do. I hate the gameplaying; I don’t want to drink fifteen pints with my workmates on weekends, even though I generally like all of them as individuals and am happy to spend time outside work with them – just not that kind of socialising. I hate the “mingling” and “getting my face known” that seems to be a prerequisite to progress here. The result? Appraisal after appraisal that says I should take on more workload from my colleagues – like hell. If they don’t do their share of the work, I see no reason to stress myself by carrying them.
I go through some of the motions of playing together in that I attend the birthday celebrations, etc. But I don’t chat much even at the dread social occasions. I don’t gossip with the other women, and I refuse to be a part of the “oh, i’m so fat and ugly that I need to constantly diet and screw with my appearance” club. I flatly refused to be part of the “relieve the receptionist rota,” and I don’t tolerate being called a girl, even by the other women.
I found a job that I don’t have to rely on others to get done, and I love it. I’m in IT with a staff small enough that there is not enough of us to form teams. Which suits us all just fine. I do have a reputation for being personally difficult in my office, especially outside of my department, because I will not be jollied along, I will not agree silently to plans that are not IMHO wise or good or possible, and I will state my honest opinion when asked. I am the one that will say that the emperor is butt-naked, or that his pet project is doomed and give the reasons why.
My new boss was shocked to find though that everyone that I “worked with” outside of the building had glowing things to say about me. That is because I don’t really work with them. I teach them how to do the work, I fix their mistakes, or I do what needs to be done myself. Everyone of them, I have saved from major disaster and kept their name and nuts out of the fire. How could they bad mouth me? After all they know that I do keep records.
Hey, at least you’re not working blue-collar jobs, where failing to make or laugh at racist and sexist jokes puts your job at risk.
We were talking to our neighbors once about college roommate experiences, and one guy mentioned that most of the people he roomed with were total introverts, and he was always the token extrovert. He was wondering why every household of introverts needed one extrovert, and my wife said, “Well, somebody has to answer the phone…”
I think I play well with others.
Provided you sit down, shut up, don’t ask stupid questions and god help you if you offer to help with my experiments.
Full disclosure: I am a manager. I have been a manager for the last 20 years. I’ve managed at multiple levels. I’ve managed part-timers, third-shifters, just-need-a-job-part-time-mothers, career-oriented-college-graduates, clerical help, technical wizards, programmers, sales-people, account managers, and more.
I understand the frustration and anger in this thread because most managers suck. Heck, early in my management life I often sucked too. (Some even claim that I sometimes still suck, but we’ll conveniently ignore this for now. ~grin~)
Contributing to this frustration is that most performance appraisal techniques also suck. Hence the seemingly ubiquitous “needs to be more of a team player”, which is often inaccurately translated by incompetent managers as “doesn’t play well with others.” Especially incompetent if they bring up the social aspect, which is usually irrelevant to an employee’s success at their job.
From a company’s perspective, the importance of “being a team player” should be limited to ensuring that everyone in the organization is aligned to the same objectives and that everyone cooperates to achieving those objectives. Making the success of the company more important than the success of the department or division is critical. “Silo” behavior is self-defeating in the long term. I’ve managed groups where there is little to no need for any interaction or cooperation between individuals, so being aligned with the company objectives does not necessarily translate into a need for interpersonal interactions.
I doesn’t matter to me if individuals tend to not socialize, as long as they do their job well. At the collective level though the socialization question is a little different. Too much socializing of course is distracting and a time waster, but too little can be a “canary in a coal mine” leading indicator that there is an unhealthy work environment. It’s hard to be productive when everyone hates each other.
Back to the OP. A poor manager using a poor performance appaisal process with a only a dim grasp of what constitutes success, will usually fall back on the “doesn’t play well with others” because they don’t know what else to say.
If the problem is backstabbing others or non-cooperation, then of course it needs to be mentioned. But directly and honestly. Not behind the facade of the need to be social. Sheesh.
I’ve been accused of being stuck-up, snobby etc., just because I don’t feel the need to be loud or to talk about mundane things. I would much rather keep to myself. That’s just how I am.
The WORST was having to sit in the little room with all the other mom’s while my daughter took dance lessons. The stupid idle chatter and gossip drove me nuts! I finally started waiting in my car, and would go in when her class was over.
I don’t fit in at all in my workplace, but I’m certain it’s because they’re all meanies and sour-faced.
It’s not me.
It’s certainly not Frannie.
I’m all for the “Anti-Whining Club.”
Heh. I was called “abrasive” at my last performance review. My unspoken thought was, “You noticed? Good. I fully intend to be abrasive at times.”