Friday, April 06, 2007

• It's 7 a.m.; can you guess where I am? It was 7 a.m. when I started writing this; can you guess where I was at that time? Yes, work! Yay. I was supposed to get here at 6:30 this morning (I usually come in at 8), but when I went downstairs at about 6:15, Mack needed a little help with homework (she's been up since 4--everybody is always trying to one-up me; when do I get to be the martyr?) so I ended up leaving at 6:25. Well, with no traffic, I can make it to work in less than 10 minutes. When I got in at 6:33, I already had three voice mails from Mr. S--assuming since I was obviously "late" that I wasn't coming in. And now that I'm here, I'm kind of sitting around waiting for him to get started.  I can't even begin to say how many times I've had to work late or come in early or work on the weekend and just basically sat around waiting for him to do something. Last night he wanted me to write something "extremely time sensitive" and fax it to him from home by midnight--I made it at about 11:50--and then this morning he said he hadn't even looked at it yet.
  
  I wrote a pretty funny email last night (I thought it was funny, at least) to these two guys who do this podcast that I listen to every week. It was about last night's episode of Suvivor (it's my guilty pleasure and last night's episode was hilarious), which they always talk about on their show. When I went to update my podcasts, I saw that they had done a show right after the Survivor episode. So I hope my email didn't contain any jokes they had already said on the show, because that would be embarrassing.
  
  A long time ago (like 8-10 years ago) I used to work for this company and the boss was just the best in terms of making work fun. I don't know how productive he was, really, although I think he was OK, but really, it was like having Ferris Bueller as your boss, and as much as it sounds like that might get old quickly, it didn't. I used to look forward to going to work every day. I worked hard, but it was always fun. Great co-workers, for the most part. I became friends with a woman who worked there. We weren't really close friends or anything, but we were more friendly than just a workplace relationship.
  
  Anyway. When our boss was transferred, our new boss was this woman who had been transferred from another area. I think I have told some of this story before, but she was a terrible manager and a terrible person. She absolutely destroyed everything that was great about working there. She pitted people against each other and constantly put people in no-win situations, like "Well, do you want to go pick up your sick child from school, or do you want this job?" It wasn't actually quite that bad, but close. She made an unforunate racial remark in a job interview once, and the guy she was interviewing was a friend of a guy who worked there; it was all really embarrassing.
  
  At one point, because she was trying to get rid of this co-worker of mine (I'll call her Julie), she told Julie that people were "badmouthing" her (Julie) in the office. Whether or not people actually were badmouthing Julie in the office, I can't say. She was a salesperson and not a particularly motivated one, and she worked short hours and may have had a bit of a drinking problem; I'm not sure. It's possible or even likely that some people took issue with her, but I didn't, at least not beyond the occasional eye roll or something. I liked her. We had a lot of fun together, we both loved tennis, and it semed like we never ran out of things to talk about.
  
  Julie was eventually forced out (and I was, too, sometime later), but as a parting shot, the new boss told her that *I* was the one badmouthing her in the office. This was completely untrue, and I certainly tried to tell Julie that it was untrue, but she left the company and we never spoke again.
  
  In the intervening years, I've thought of Julie from time to time and thought that if we were still friends we would probably go out once in a while and have fun.
  
  Well, last week I went to play a tennis match at the public courts. Not the public courts where I usually play, but a different set of indoor courts. And guess who was working at the front desk.
  
  The person I was playing with went to the desk and got our court information, etc. and Julie would not even look at me. I kind of tried to catch her eye, but she was having none of it. At first I thought maybe she didn't remember me, but honestly, she had to be working hard not to even glance at me. It just wasn't normal. I didn't say anything to her, partly out of respect, partly because I didn't know what to say, and partly because I thought she might lay into me in front of this other person, or tell me to screw off or something. I thought about it afterward, though, and the whole situation bothers me.
  
  I went to play there again this week, and I told myself that if she was there again, I would at least say "how you doing?" or something to her. She was there again, and when I went to pay (I didn't pay the time before) she said "it's ten dollars" and basically refused to look at me. I handed her a 10 and she took it without a word. So I didn't say anything more to her.
  
  I'm going back next week, I think, and this is really bugging me. It's not that I want to be best friends or anything, but I wouldn't mind going out and getting a beer or whatever (actually I hope she's in AA or something). I think we'd have a great time if we could get past the unpleasantness. Obviously, what our horrible fromer boss said really hurt her, and it wasn't true. I'd like to try to set it right, whether it ended with us getting a beer or not (much less having an ongoing friendship of some sort--I think that ship has probably sailed).
  
  In person, it's really awkward and she's at her job and there are people around and everything, so I don't know that I feel comfortable trying to really say anything to her in that setting. I don't think it would be fair to her. I checked the phone book and she's listed, so I could call her and leave a message, or I could write a short note (not trying to explain everything, just kind of more of a "hi") and give it to her next time I'm at the tennis center. I might be playing there a lot this spring and summer, and I would hate for the awkwardness to continue and not even try to deal with it--which brings up the third option, which I guess is to do nothing and continue to have these weird exchanges.
  
  I guess the net of all this is I would like to put the ball in her court (heh) without doing it in an uncomfortable, public way. Whatever she chooses to do with it is OK with me, I guess, but at least I'll know I've done what I could.
  
  So what would you do?

  Currently Listening The Calling By Mary Chapin Carpenter see related

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