OK, so then no, never, female. Change mine from yes - I cried briefly on 9/11. My boss saw from across a crowded room where we were gathered around listening to the radio. Byt he time he started toward me I had gotten control of myslef, but I was quite embarassed.
Cry at work? Of course not.
Cry in front of a teacher? As an adult? People do that? Why?
I can understand it if it happens for reasons unrelated to work or school – if one is grieving or going through some kind of trauma and just happened to be at work or schoo, but crying because a boss yells at you, or you aren’t getting good grades or whatever? That possibility just seems alien to me.
This and the stuff in the other thread, I do. not. understand. At all.
Crying, to me, is like vomiting. It’s something that happens which is extremely hard to control. I don’t want to do either one in front of other people. But sometimes shit happens.
Who are these people who can turn their tears on and off at will? I am completely baffled.
See, this is what I don’t get. Nothing against the person who posted this, which is why I took the name out (it’s not like you all can’t check).
As for controlling it, YOU CAN. It is not easy however. It takes years of work if you are a crier to start with, and you will still get the urge to cry and sometimes it will be nigh uncontrollable. But you learn tips and techniques and you learn to hide it.
You know people think of me as the cool, calm, collected one at work now? Me! Little Miss Emotional! I am living proof that you can indeed do it.
No. It’s inappropriate and unprofessional. Gender has nothing to do with it.
To me it’s not so much a question of controlling it, so much as that I could simply never see myself getting into that kind of emotional state at work in the first place. Angry, maybe, but not blubbering.
The only work-related exceptions I could see would involve work-related situations which would be extraordinarily emotional. I don’t mean like a boss yelling at you, or working 18 hour days, I mean like if you’re an EMT and you see people die.
At school, I can’t conceive of anything that would be worth crying about. It’s just school.
Yup. I learned how to squint up my eyes and redirect the emotional “output.” I suspect I was just never taught how to deal with extreme anger and frustration before then (and generally crying is considered A-OK for little girls and really awful for little boys) and so when something dramatic did happen I sucked at coping with it.
Sigh. I failed one of my Ph.D. comprehensive exams. It was bad. I had various meetings with professors to talk about what I needed to do differently when I retook them, and their minimal expectations just seemed impossible to meet. I ended up crying in three different professors’ offices. Would definitely prefer to never do that again, but in a similarly emotionally fraught situation, I’m not sure how I’d avoid it.
This is what I said in the other crying at work thread. When all the ladies came out to inform me that crying was an involuntary action, such as boners or throwing up, I asked why on Earth are you getting that upset at work in the first place? What do your jobs entail that would create such emotional involvement? If there was ever an answer to that, I missed it.
And I’ve been mad at work. I’ve been repeatedly sexually harassed by my direct supervisor, and trust me, that pissed me off handsomely, but there was no crying. What the hell would I cry for?
Well, maybe so. I’ve been working since I was 14 years old, so that’s 35 years. I have cried at the workplace a grand total of once, and it was behind closed doors. That was because I was angry, oddly enough. The bank had called and informed me that since my ex-husband had defaulted on a car loan, they had taken the entire balance out of my checking account.
I still don’t get those people who cry on cue. I can’t imagine being able to do that.
MeanOldLady, I’m talking to you, specifically, because Diogenes the Cynic has definitely shown tendencies in the past to pick a POV and JUST NOT LISTEN.
People are different. You know this, yes? I really am not talking down to you, just bear with me. Not all of us are as tough as nails. Some of us are more emotional. If I tell you that I have had tears come to my eyes from a fucking AT&T commercial where they are calling India and talking to their families, you’ll probably think less of me, yes? But it just happens. Sometimes I hear a touching story and it happens. I read about a violent rape and I feel tears prick my eyes.
What I am saying is we criers don’t have to be terribly upset. Our bodies just react in this way. I don’t know why. It’s always been like this for me, since I was a girl. Perhaps it’s because my mother was generally an emotionless woman; I don’t know. Maybe it’s genetic. I’m sure it has something to do with my upbringing, growing up with extremely low self-esteem. Regardless of the causes, the fact is it happens.
Now what can we do to deal with it? Well as I have said I for one find it incredibly humiliating and have gone above and beyond to deal with it. That doesn’t mean that everyone is willing or able to. It takes years of work, really, if you tend to be emotional to start with.
It’s like this. Learning to be angry over something FIRST is a nice thing, and I am a little envious of people who have it. We learn to be upset over something first. Anger comes later. Between those two, anger is inevitably the better - the healthier - reaction. However, I have cultivated a sort of Zen so I rarely get genuinely angry, either, and if I am upset, you’ll never know.
This is hard.
Does that help at all? Make a little sense?
Yes, from now on I will, actually.
No, but seriously, fair enough. Some people are criers, some people are not. Is it unreasonable to ask that criers shuffle off to the restroom or some such, and not cry in front of everybody at the office? It’s… unseemly.
Hey, some of those AT&T commercials are really tear-jerking! 
But I agree with you that one should shuffle off to the bathroom. I am only saying you can’t help the reaction, but you can definitely help your actions afterwards. Let me tell you this story. No, let me tell you it over PM, it’s too identifying. Hang on. You’ll be amazed.
Can we hide in our offices instead, with the door mostly shut? That’s what I do.
Maybe it’s just because different people have different thresholds for crying. For me, there has to be a pretty high level of emotional involvement before I’ll cry uncontrollably (and it can happen). I guess the bar gets set at different levels.
For me, it’s like Dio–crying just doesn’t even occur to me as an immediate option. Maybe if something results from it, or I have some time to think about it later, I might cry in frustration. . .but that’s going to be much later, when I’m not at work. On that visceral level, it’s like saying, “well, he said something I didn’t like, so I stood on my head and recited the pledge of allegiance in Sumerian.” It just wouldn’t occur to me to do that.
And I think that because it doesn’t occur to me to do that, there are times where I can have an immediate judgement–because it wouldn’t naturally occur to me to cry, then obviously it wouldn’t occur to anyone else to cry, so they must have chosen to do so. Of course, then the rest of my brain kicks in and reminds me that people react to things differently, and I should STFU and be sympathetic.
Sure. My beef is with the office crybabies. I said this in a PM, so I’ll post it again here because it seems appropriate.
I don’t cry, but I’m no monster. I don’t like to see people unhappy, so generally when people cry, I feel bad for them. I do start to lose my patience, however, with people who cry in front of people all the time, whenever there’s any unpleasantness. There’s a woman at work who cries every year/quarter end without fail. Jesus, you work a finance job! It’s stressful for all of us, but it’s no more stressful than the last quarter end, or the one before that. I don’t know if she’s a drama queen or just a crier, but in either case, but does she really have to cry in front of everyone every single time?
Good comparison. Some people have done it once in their lives, some do it all the time (and some can’t control it). And most if not all would love to be able to make it to the bathroom before they spew.
I do see what you mean, but IME crying is spontaneous. There’s no thinking about it. It doesn’t occur to me to do it either !
I did realize something here though. I got to thinking, well, duh, actors have to cry on cue; so they must have learned how to cry on demand. I reckon there are people who have trained themselves to do that. Or, like 'mika says, trained themselves to hold back and not do it.