I’m sorry, I gotta call bullshit on that.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness - remember that? He has had every opportunity to improve himself but he hasn’t chosen to take advantage of them. Lots of other people have, so there is no excuse for his not doing so.
I’m sorry, I wrote it in one go, and I see it looks like it. I can’t see away to go in and edit.
Thank you to the person who did it for me in the later post.
Amanda138a
Unfortunately, there’s no editing here after 5 minutes. However, if you quote yourself, you could copy and paste it, then add punctuation. But that may not be worth your time.
As for being selfish to not have kids, the only reason the people I know have had kids is because they wanted them - it doesn’t get much more selfish than that, does it? I think you should let yourself off the hook for that at least.
You’re feeling guilty, and blaming it on your coworker. To hell with therapy, go with philanthropy instead. Go volunteer; it’s not all soup kitchens, ya know. There will be deeds you can do that help others out while making you feel good at the same time. If you don’t at least try to give back ,you’ve only yourself to blame.
P.s. beaten to the punch in previous posts, and that’s ok. Short version is that you can’t save the world, no, but you can certainly make your neighborhood a little better.
Well, no one can reason you out of a position you didn’t reason yourself into, so I guess you’re out of luck. I’m not joking–your position is pretty irrational, and you’re repeating his cycle of feeling sorry for yourself because you feel sorry for him.
[QUOTE=astro]
Not to get too far off the beam, but I’m curious how are you “co-working” with an illiterate man who can’t read or write?
[/QUOTE]
Different jobs in the same work group.
[QUOTE=HoneyBadgerDC]
Not sure how old you are but I have a feeling you may just be exoeriencing a new emotion you are unfamiliar with. It might take a little bit for you to sort it out and put it into perspective but I have a feeling you will. When we leave home and our familiar neighbors and friends we start to experience new things. Part of the growing up process is learning how to deal with things that are new to us. My guess is you are just feeling growing pains.
[/QUOTE]
I’m 38 and on career #3. Careers #1 and #2 were middle-class desk jobs, so I never really came into contact with desperately poor people. Then after my last job ended, I couldn’t bring myself to do the 9-5 thing anymore and I decided to pursue a childhood dream and went to cooking school. I’m a cook and my coworker is a dishwasher.
I gave Willy Loman the benefit of the doubt for a long time. In the beginning, I was too busy trying to prove to my coworkers that I wasn’t incompetent - in addition to being older and just out of school, I was also female. I didn’t really think about Willy Loman’s circumstances - it never occurred to me until later that a 60-ish family man is stuck washing dishes to support his family because there’s something very bad wrong with him.
My long term goal is my own restaurant. I need to learn how to spot Willy Lomans on sight, so I can never ever hire them. This scares me - it took me a year to figure out he was pity trolling us.
I’m hoping this is not your intent, but it almost sounds like you’re telling me I should have children anyway because I’ll want them when they’re mine.
Oh, I’m quite sure he knows exactly what he’s doing. All the times I’ve looked down to see his hand in front of my crotch tell me he gets something out of making me squirm.
And yes, everyone is technically correct - I personally didn’t create his problems. I just don’t believe that absolves me. It’s like a white person saying to a black, “Hey, I didn’t enslave you so I don’t need to examine my white privilege.”
Assuming he’s in his late 50s and dropped out of school before his grasp of reading and writing had time to completely gel, I’ll guess he dropped out in the late 1960s. He made a choice, but I believe he made it in good faith with what he knew at the time. If he was a poor boy from a poor family, he wasn’t going to go to college. And fancy book learning was for sissies - back then a man could support a family with his hands! And staying in school would have been actively bad - his family would have missed out on the income he would make by dropping out to work.
And then society pulled the carpet out from under him. We went from an industrial economy to a service economy. Whoops - so much for a man supporting a family with his hands. It doesn’t help that educated people like me raise the standards when we take blue collar jobs. He used to work as a cook - now he can’t because we’re expected to read and write and do 'rithmetic.
It’s a terrible situation that I didn’t create and am struggling to handle correctly.
You are experiencing intrusive thoughts about co-worker that hinder your ability to function properly. This has happened to you before with other co-workers in the past as well. You keep complaining about this, but you don’t seem like you actually want to take any steps that might help you solve your problem. Why is that, do you suppose?
I feel guilty for ruining people’s lives. At the same time, I feel resentment toward people who make claims on me that I suspect are not entirely justified. I’ve never gotten a completely satisfactory explanation of what constitutes selfishness or selflessness, so I’m left trying to guess. All I know is I’ve been called “selfish” many times when I was minding my own business doing my own thing.
I expect I’ll be leaving this job in the next few months, for other reasons. I’m hoping that once I stop seeing Willy Loman every week, this will all feel like a bad dream…
But you aren’t ruining anybody’s life. You’re not responsible for the world. Look down. Do you see a golden W on your chest? No? Then you are not Wonder Woman! (She isn’t supposed to be responsible for all of the world’s woes anyway either)
You are no more ruining Willy’s life than you are writing the manuals I sign or making the sun shine.
Make better what you can, but what you can not, you are not responsible for. Volunteer, be the best cook you can be with the resources at hand, be nice to people, stop ironing your partner’s ears with Willy’s woes, give to charity, help little old ladies get something from a high shelf at the supermarket, but don’t blame yourself for the monsoon rains.
The irony is, by trying to be nice to my other coworkers, I’m making his life harder. Other people are happy to work with me because I try to get work done at the end of the day to make things easier for the opening shift. But this means that Willy Loman is stuck working later on closing shifts - he’s always trying to rush me out and take things away from me before I’m done with them.
I have the same dilemma every weekend evening - do I do right by my team by setting them up to succeed or do I right by one angry man by rushing to get out early?
I’ve spoken to management to try to get his schedule changed so he doesn’t have to work nights. They won’t listen to me - he tells them he’ll take any hours they’ll give him, and they take his word at face value. But I know he doesn’t want to work nights because he’s told me so - in words and in behavior.
It’s just a big shitty diaper.
He sounds like a psychotic troll who has found exactly where your soft spots are and has you wrapped right around his little finger. Will you feel less guilty when you remember that he’s a psychotic excuse for a troll?
This might be a subject for another thread, but do you seriously think people have children out of some sort of selfless sacrifice to the greater good? Bollocks do they. They have kids because they want to feel important, or fit in with their friends, or keep their parents happy, or because they aspire to a chocolate box lifestyle, or want little eyes looking up to them with unconditional love, or because they don’t want to get lonely in their old age (my mother, who is an angel, agrees with the last one).
There is nothing selfish or unselfish about having or not having kids. It’s a just a lifestyle choice we all have the right to make, either way.
If you really want to be selfish, then punishing your partner with constant moaning and not doing enjoyable things with them out of some misplaced guilt, THAT’S selfish. Look after the ones you love.
Getting back to the restaurant thing - I read Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential and I recommend it to you. I’ve never worked in food service, but Tony’s advice looks solid. The book is also a fun read.
Have you spoken to management about how he’s a bad worker who keeps trying to grope you? Because that’s what you should be concerned about, not whether this guy is happy with the hours he agreed to.
The way you are dealing with this situation is not healthy or normal, and I second the recommendation that you see a therapist.
Boundaries. Own them.
You aren’t responsible for this man, or for making your coworkers happy, or for doing anything at your job other than that which you are paid to do. If Willy decides to work 24/7, that is his decision to make. Whether or not he wants to, he is choosing to, and you are way overstepping your bounds – and his autonomy – by speaking to management about changing his hours. Unless, that is, your goal is to separate yourself from him; then it would be appropriate to approach your manager about YOUR problem, while understanding that they aren’t obligated to solve it for you (unless he is actively creating a hostile work environment or sexually harassing you – they have to address that, but not necessarily in a way that you would prefer).
It is well within your right – in fact, imperative to your own emotional health, that you set boundaries with Willy. That means first, committing to seeing him as a human who is your equal, not some sad and pathetic caricature of a man that you waste your benevolently useless pity on. He is NOT desperately poor. Apparently, you have never SEEN desperately poor. He has food and shelter, and a means by which to obtain both, which elevates his status far beyond desperate when compared to much of the rest of the world. Your education and opportunities are the result of life choices you made, by and large, just as his choices define him. I am over-simplifying a bit here, but the point is, he’s not inferior to you in any way. He is a man who viewed his options, and made his choices. You may not have outright SAID any of these things, but they are tucked between the lines of what you’ve written and heavily implied in the assumptions that you are making.
Once you view this man as your equal, perhaps then you can own the behaviors that have allowed his “pity trolling” to thrive. You don’t want to be his friend. You don’t even like him. The next time he approaches you with anything not work-related, you tell him in no uncertain terms that you no longer want to involve yourself in his problems. Had you not provided the opening in the first place, as in, shut him down the very FIRST time he made you feel uncomfortable, he wouldn’t be feeling that the carpet has been yanked out from under him now. You will probably have to ignore some unpleasant behavior and reaffirm several times that the new reality is that you are coworkers with a superficially cordial relationship and nothing more.
The world doesn’t want, and has no use, for your misplaced pity. A starving child benefits not one bit by my tears and hand-wringing and denying myself happiness because he has nothing to eat. He benefits only by a measurable action on my part, and even at that, probably only temporarily, depending on how I choose to act and given my own limited resources. Based only on my own life circumstances, I have made my choices, because I can’t unsee some of the awful things that I have seen. I choose to donate to reliable charities. I don’t deserve a round of applause or a pat on the back, it is one very limited but benevolently USEFUL choice that I’ve made and it helps me to sleep at night to know that I am doing something that isn’t wringing my hands and shedding tears.
There is something extremely disingenuous about your paralysis around this man, and how your pity blinds you to his and your own reality. You aren’t helpless. And you aren’t helping him either. If he were any kind of emotionally healthy, he would be righteously offended by your pity. Seriously. Stop it. Anytime my mind strays to my international travels and the true, overwhelmingly life-threatening, slum-dwelling, hopeless poverty that I have seen (of the variety that robs us ALL of humanity, including the victims) I ask myself who is benefitting from my angst. If the victims of dire life circumstances could spare themselves a thought to ME, I imagine that emotion would be something like … contempt.
Even though your coworker does sound like a horrible person, I have never regretted being kinder than necessary (though I’m also not a doormat). So, personally, I might try to anonymously give him a gift card just to be nice, if I really felt bad about how crappy his life is. If you don’t feel bad enough to actually do anything about other people’s lousy life circumstances, though, then I would say there is no sense in dwelling on it and you really should talk to a therapist.
A therapist is the perfect person to listen to this type of stuff.