Social Awkwardness?

[Ortallus]

@jinshei said in Social Awkwardness?:

@ortallus said in Social Awkwardness?:

@jinshei said in Social Awkwardness?:

(I use spoon theory at work to illustrate to my patients why they should all delegate where they can)

My gf and I use it all the time, just to communicate and express our needs and wants:

"Hey babe, do you have spoons to cut my hair tonight?"

"I dunno maybe, I'm pretty tapped out. Work cost me a lot of spoons today. Can we do it tomorrow?"

It helps to understand that it's not personal if someone doesn't want to do something, and it's not an 'excuse'. We respect each other's spoon usage and needs.

We use it as a get out of jail thing just like you! Himself has a low social spoon level, and I don't but I get brain fogged and out of thinking (or manic and demanding Everything Happens NOW!). Its a good way to communicate the amount of energy. The only amendment I make to the original is that there are different spoon pools - I might have physical ones but not social.

Haha, we totally use that too. In fact, just the other day I said, "Baby, I am straight out of kitten spoons tonight. I mean, I can make dinner and watch a show with you tonight, but I swear if that cat pukes one more time..."

And she said, "No worries baby, I haven't seen the cats all day, I'll take care of it."

It's really quite effective once you learn the methodology.

[fortydeuce]

@jinshei said in Social Awkwardness?:

I used to work with social workers who would send me a long, rambling email and then two minutes later come to tell me what it said, with added details, when I was obviously flat out. All I wanted for them to tell me was the problem, and what they wanted from me. Just the facts. I don't need to know that the patient gave you biscuits and tea. They also persisted in stopping for morning and afternoon tea (a very Aussie workplace thing it seemed to me), and social events and ... oh god, the forced social interactions.

I'll see you and raise you with:

1. Forced social actions in academia, with people you actively dislike, and
2. Student E-mails. "Can I have an extension on my paper? I am really swamped with two jobs and five classes" = yes, you can! "Can I have an extension on my paper? <Long, rambling story which I don't care about and which may not be entirely true because you don't want to come out and say that you're just busy and oh my God do I really have to read this I have like 10 other papers to get to grading!> = noooo. I am the nicest person when it comes to extensions and stuff like that, but if you don't get to the point, I am dying inside.

[JinShei]

@fortydeuce Hehe I did uni lecturing over there and I FEEL your pain! My fav was "I didn't have time to write it because I have this other essay, and I have to go to placement" - Like every other student.

[Sockmonkey]

@jinshei said in Social Awkwardness?:

... oh god, the forced social interactions.

FUCK OFFICE SOCIAL EVENTS. I SPEND AT LEAST NINE HOURS A DAY, FIVE DAYS A WEEK WITH YOU MOTHERFUCKERS. I CERTAINLY AM NOT GOING TO GIVE YOU SOME OF MY GODDAMN EVENING HOURS SO WE CAN STAND AROUND IN A CROWDED BAR DRINKING SHITTY BEER AND SCREAMING OVER MUSIC THAT IS TOO LOUD MAKING CONVERSATION THAT I COULDN'T GIVE A RAT'S ASS ABOUT. AND DON'T EVEN COME AT ME WITH AN INVITATION FOR A WEEKEND GO-CARTING EVENT BECAUSE THAT IS NOT FUCKING HAPPENING, BECKY, SO YOU CAN GO BACK TO YOUR GOD DAMN DESK AND LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE. I ALSO DON'T WANT TO HEAR YOU FUCKING COMPLAINING ABOUT HOW I 'NEVER DO ANYTHING WITH THE GROUP' BECAUSE, FOR FUCK'S SAKE, I WAS NOT HIRED TO BE YOUR FRIEND. I WAS HIRED TO BE A MOTHERFUCKING PROFESSIONAL.

Yeah, so. I don't like socializing with my co-workers outside of work.

[Packrat]

I honestly do not mind socializing with most of my coworkers but there really is a limit. A few months ago I was at a conference and some bastard scheduled stuff every single evening until midnight, every day.

I just... No, after 10 hours of conference and workshops I need to go and relax with some alone time. Occasionally I do very much enjoy a night out with people drinking beers and chatting about stuff but no more than once or twice a week. Definitely not every day until midnight when we are putting in long days in an unfamiliar place and I want to be properly awake.

[Arkandel]

@sockmonkey said in Social Awkwardness?:

FUCK OFFICE SOCIAL EVENTS.

Maaan you'd hate me. I'm that guy who set up company basketball games every Friday and keep trying to set up playing in leagues wearing our colors. I go to soccer every Thursday - and I hate soccer. I've bugged my boss to set up lunch time events (volunteer only, of course) with board games, and asked around for bowling, escape rooms and laser tag to see what their group prices are.

I dunno. I like hanging out with people from work under circumstances which aren't work related. In fact I heavily discourage talking about work-stuff at all during those; it's just an opportunity for us to know each other as people a bit better.

Even more so I find I bond with and work better with people I've had fun with and give a shit about. It lets me learn more about them; do they whine when they lose and blame their failures on someone else or do they try to play to their strengths and pick on roles they can do better at? Do they celebrate someone else's cool moments and not just their own? Will they defer to others if they're in a better position to score?

Dunno. I agree though that if these things were forced and/or 'heavily encouraged' it'd be just another chore, and thus horrible. Basically if there's any kind of work hierarchy carried over to the event it's useless to me. You can be a manager elsewhere, but on the court you're just you, and I'm going to drop f-bombs as freely as anywhere else.

[surreality]

I am again pretty much in the 'nope, you couldn't pry me out with co-workers' thing, which I learned during the days before all the work-from-home self-employment stuff.

But that brings me to another thing.

I will flip out if I do not feel like I'm being productive enough.

I'm extremely detail-oriented and fussy•, so the kinds of things I do are very rarely 'slap 'em together and call it a day' sorts of things, no matter what the actual facet of the job is that time. (Graphics, jewelry, etc. Dye-related stuff is the wild card; it's like the one 'throw shit in a pot and run with it'/'creative mess-making' exception, and it's necessary for sanity once in a while.)

This makes 'yeah, my schedule is flexible'... true and not. It is true in that 'I can plan to get my work done by a certain time so I can do something at <X> hour'.

It is not true in that I set completely unrealistic standards for what I should be able to get done in a specified period of time -- even accounting for the fussiness -- and the worst bit is...

...about half the time, I actually meet them. This is how I end up with three file boxes of fussy-detailed little earrings in a week and a half while doped to the gills on painkillers immediately after surgery, five lawn and garden-size trash bags of dyed yarn when given a 'hey, we have a show next weekend, want to sell with us?' after I've just sold them every scrap of my existing stock and have only a handful of days to produce more on my own, and similar things more or less on the regular.

This is just really not how sane people operate... at all. The common thread to the art jobs is apparently 'not smart enough to realize I cannot consistently pull miracles out of my ass without killing myself with stress'. But it does work for me in most ways, because the 'not doing it' hits the YOU ARE NOT BEING PRODUCTIVE ENOUGH button, and that thing fires off a nuclear self-destruct sequence, I'm sure of it.

It's that... other half of the time. The other half of the time when it takes a completely sensible amount of time to complete a task rather than my crash-course 'don't rush through or skip steps or even the fussy levels of finishing, but don't you slack for a hot second!' approach's amount of time.

Then my schedule's just fucked, and I am suddenly the world's worst flake on scheduling and anything social, because... work has to come first, even if my work is super Peter Pan/Never Growin' Up! as far as work goes in many respects. I mean, sole proprietorship... there's no underlings or overlings I can blame if shit doesn't get done here.

Working from home? Also means you are always at work, not just that you're always at home. There's no hour o'clock that you can call it quits and turn off the work brain as easily because you're 'going home now'.

Thankfully, a few of my friends get this. Most people who have never been in this kind of position cannot wrap their brains around it to save their lives, and I can't blame them -- it is really weird even if it's understandable if you think about it some.

• I'm the same way with stuff in personal time as well. If y'all had any idea how many times I have tweaked and re-tweaked the same core concept wiki on and off over the past three years on the most minute 'nobody but me would likely even notice that' level, you would laugh, and should laugh.

[ThatGuyThere]

Work place related social activities are probably the biggest bane of modern existence. All the fun or work with none of that pesky getting paid.
Of course I learned in an amusing way that things said at these outings can and will be used against you later at my first job.
This was right after college, a small group of co-workers went out and got coffee after ship and just sat around and shot the shit. During the course of the convo one of the coworkers started telling party stories so I shared a few including one with illegal drug use mentioned. Amazingly enough the next day me and said co-worker were 'randomly' selected for a drug test. The amusing part is they told us what was going on but not the third person who was a lady in her seventies who I think was mainly picked to give the appearance of randomness and had been with the company for over a decade. So we get to the place where the screening will take place and 70 old asks what is up. HR dude tells her and she decided to quit rather than take the test because she said she would not pass it. While me and the other one who were sharing war stories the previous night both tested fine.
Second Favorite moment in work life, was when HR dude who I did not like and did not like me gave me my results and I got to gloat about it. I think my exact words were, "I knew i would pass, but hey any time you want to give me a two hour break to come here and take it again feel free." (Favorite was about 6 months later when HR dude's mommy and daddy sold the company and he got turfed immediately after the meeting where this was announced.)

[Auspice]

My team at work is the first time I actually enjoy hanging out with the people I work with. I'd go out and drink with them.

However, I think it hugely depends on the way the company atmosphere is. At my company, we drink. No drinking on the clock, but there's office parties pretty often and we drink p heavily at those (and I have drank on the clock, but that's because I'm usually the one and sometimes only one stuck working and I think they feel bad for me >.>). We swear. We've had VPs in the office and they're lax with language, themselves.

But we all know to tighten up and act right when there's a client around.

Basically? We're treated like adults and I think that's the key thing.

So many companies treat you like children. You're put into this behavioral box for 8-10 hours a day and then they want you to go on these outings where it's even more of a box because you're also expected to 'have fun!' within X parameters.

Yeah, no. At my job it's not like that.

We're irreverent. One guy actually said the other day: 'We're fucked if someone really sensitive ever comes in here, you guys realize that.'

And it's not because we say really bad things. It's because we're just that candid. We're all really liberal, but we discuss a broad range of topics, we rag on each other, we bullshit... If one of us fucks up, we'll call each other out on it. And not like, major fuck ups. Like "Yo, Bob, you forgot to put that note on the ticket again! Do I have to throw things at you?!"

[Sockmonkey]

@Arkandel Nah, I wouldn't have hated you. Not unless you aggressively harassed me to attend the events and then held it against me when I didn't go. It's not the mere existence of work-social events that irritate me -- I appreciate that there are functions available for my more sociable colleagues. Haha, if anything, it gives them an outlet to socialize away from me.

What I don't like is when work-social events are made to feel like part of the job and that you are damaging your career and chance for advancement when you don't participate.

I do have individual social relationships with some of my co-workers outside of work. I'll catch a movie with one co-worker, grab dinner with another. It's these team-wide events that feel like you WILL have fun (but not too much fun, the VP is watching and HR is here guyz) that, if you don't attend, your manager starts to wonder openly why you aren't a 'team player'...

URGH.

I need my after-work hours to recharge and chill, yo.

[Arkandel]

@sockmonkey said in Social Awkwardness?:

I appreciate that there are functions available for my more sociable colleagues. Haha, if anything, it gives them an outlet to socialize away from me.

What I don't like is when work-social events are made to feel like part of the job and that you are damaging your career and chance for advancement when you don't participate.

Oh, making you go do anything on your own time is quite annoying. Unless you pay me it should my choice whether to invest my time like that or not.

However I definitely don't consider myself a sociable person per se. If anything I'm an introvert; if you leave me to my own devices I'll choose to go home and play video games, watch TV or any number of solo activities. Even my workout of choice is solitary. I don't even like generically hanging out; I need an activity to tolerate groups larger than a couple of people. But I make it a point to force myself to socialize just because I don't think it's healthy for me to avoid people.

What I do know is that even like that it's definitely benefited my career so far to socialize. I don't do it for that purpose (there are more efficient ways to go about that) but there's absolutely an upside to knowing people I wouldn't have normally hanged out with by their first names; we get to call on favors, feel better about going over to ask questions and generally we take advantage of this familiarity. It's just how it is.

[Sockmonkey]

@arkandel said in Social Awkwardness?:

What I do know is that even like that it's definitely benefited my career so far to socialize. I don't do it for that purpose (there are more efficient ways to go about that) but there's absolutely an upside to knowing people I wouldn't have normally hanged out with by their first names; we get to call on favors, feel better about going over to ask questions and generally we take advantage of this familiarity. It's just how it is.

(Emphasis mine)

Oh man, I know. And boy do I hate that part of the game. It's probably one of the main reasons why even though I am really good at my job and respected for what I do, I remain at the senior worker-bee level rather than having made the jump into the management/executive track. Plus, I don't use the word synergy nearly enough.

[TiredEwok]

In person I am very socially awkward. I am outgoing as well, which makes for this interesting mishmash of personality traits. I try very hard not to be awkward, but when it really gets the better of me I find it hard to look people in the eyes when I talk to them and sometimes my hands and voice tremble slightly and it makes me feel more aware of the awkwardness and... yeah.

[Kanye Qwest]

@ortallus Fool, you can't cut hair with spoons. Spoons aren't even sharp.

[Arkandel]

@kanye-qwest http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CutHisHeartOutWithASpoon

[Kanye Qwest]

@arkandel RIP Rickman

[KDraygo]

@ortallus said in Social Awkwardness?:

There's a really good book by Susan Cain called "Quiet: The Power of Introverts In A World That Can't Stop Talking". She actually talks about the scientific research done regarding introverts and extroverts on a biological level, and it's some pretty fascinating stuff.

She also has a very interesting TED talk.

If you think you're an introvert, or even just know an introvert, or are an extrovert that wants to understand the difference, I highly recommend both.

Just read the transcripts of that video, very informative, great link. Certainly helps me understand much better on what being an introvert means.

[Ortallus]

@kdraygo said in Social Awkwardness?:

@ortallus said in Social Awkwardness?:

There's a really good book by Susan Cain called "Quiet: The Power of Introverts In A World That Can't Stop Talking". She actually talks about the scientific research done regarding introverts and extroverts on a biological level, and it's some pretty fascinating stuff.

She also has a very interesting TED talk.

If you think you're an introvert, or even just know an introvert, or are an extrovert that wants to understand the difference, I highly recommend both.

Just read the transcripts of that video, very informative, great link. Certainly helps me understand much better on what being an introvert means.

If you liked it, the book might be very worthwhile to you. It opened my eyes to a number of interesting things in regards to the introvert/extrovert spectrum.