Have you ever had the joy of working with one of those ‘wonderful’ people who, the moment you see them some distance down the hallway looming towards you, make you think, “Nope! Not going that way,” right before you turn sharply and head for the rickety stairway?
It’s as if they have Wrong Way, Do Not Enter, or Severe Tire Damage tattooed on their ugly stinky faces. Unlike their friendly, affable colleagues, whose warm smiles and humanistic gestures of empathy bring a fleeting sense of joy to your insides that makes you want to live, these people seem to exist for the sole purpose of letting others know that theirs is a life not worth living.
What is it about them that makes them so undesirable to be around? It’s difficult to express in written words, but to start with, they always seem to be exuding a form of a negative emotion. They are never, “Hey! Great to see you!”, no they are usually all, “So, I’m going to go ahead and ask you to do something you will find tedious and monotonous, and then later I will follow up every few minutes to make sure you are still on top of it.” Or, “Does this look like cancer to you? I glanced sideways at something that I thought was a crayon, but it may have been plutonium and it more than likely gave me cancer. Is this what cancer looks like?”
These emotional blackholes are the Eeyores of the workplace. No matter what you do for them, it is never enough and never good enough, and almost always because you suck somehow. Are they ever happy? No, of course not. Are they ever not in a bad mood, with some personal disaster constantly unfolding? No, and enough with the rhetorical questions. How about this for advice, “Deal with your shit before you come to work, and stop expecting special treatment from people just because you are perpetually having a bad day. In the meantime, leave me alone.”
Yet, if you were to give them the much needed punch in the face that they deserve, you would be the bad guy. Trust me, it’s a trap; don’t make that mistake.
—DG.
Inside Doug's Head 