Relegated To Wallflower

I rarely get upset and even in those rare instances, I tend not to show it.  My voice doesn’t get louder.  My facial expressions do not change.  If anything, and I can’t explain why this is, but if anything, my vocabulary changes and I find myself using words that have more than two syllables.  I don’t know what I suddenly speak in such an elevated fashion, but I do.

Last week, I found myself getting upset at Serena over something that many might find to have been small and/or wholly insignificant.  Maybe this is because I tend to be especially detailed-oriented and I see small details that maybe most people wouldn’t?  In this particular incident, Serena found herself visiting me as she and I tend to do when we’re in the office together.  This is merely one of the games we play, where we try to find any reason to see each other during the workday.  One of these games is actually one of the more overt ones that we play, where we simply get up and walk across the office and visit the other’s cubicle.  Sometimes the chat is work-related and genuinely important.  Other times, we pretend to make it work-related and important when it really isn’t.  Last week, I noticed something that she would do and I had to call her out on it because it bothered the hell out of me.

Ernie sits behind my cubicle.  Since I’m not readily listening to him, being that I usually have my headphones or earbuds in, I can’t vouch for what he is doing in his cubicle at any given moment.  I just assume he’s working.  He could be asleep for all I care.  I am clearly aware that Serena and Ernie are friends, in the sense that they know each other because they happened to come into the office at the same time and just so happened to be in the same training cohort.

Of late, Serena has had this annoying habit of coming to my cubicle to converse, whether this is for a legitimate conversation or something trivial, and initiating conversation with me.  As we are in the middle of talking about what it is we happen to be talking about (sometimes even just seconds into our conversation), Serena will glance over at Ernie and immediately engage in another conversation with him, as though she and I weren’t just communicating seconds earlier.  As she does so, she proceeds to completely ignore me, as if I wasn’t even there.  Being that I am no longer in any kind of conversation at this point, I put my earbuds back in and carry on with whatever I was doing before Serena even got there.  Serena and Ernie talk for who knows how long and I’ve already gone back to my work.

Suddenly, Serena remembers that I’m there and she reverts to talking to me, as if the conversation she just had with Ernie never happened (or I’m just supposed to forget that it happened).  I didn’t even know what we were talking about because I had no reason to retain it, because she abruptly ended our conversation and moved on to talking to someone else.  I went back to doing my own work.

Finally, I had to tell her something because I didn’t think this sort of thing was fair to me.  Normally, I wouldn’t care but when this happens consistently and almost always when Ernie happens to be at his desk, I had reached my boiling point.  I know that I caught Serena by surprise with this, but I didn’t care.  I had to address this situation as soon as I was able to do so.

I think we came to an understanding and some kind of resolution, none of which I feel like delving into right now, though even as I write this, I still believe that this is going to happen again even still.  This sort of thing has happened so many times already that I have no reason to think that this is going to stop any time soon.

I guess you could say that I am conflicted, even though I don’t mean to be.

I don’t know where I was going with this entry when I started writing.  I just grabbed the keyboard and just started rambling.

What I do know is this and even if it isn’t his fault, I now find myself looking at Ernie with a fair amount of disdain because I am truly of the mindset that he has no sense of respect for boundaries and perhaps, in recognizing that when two people are clearly engaged in conversation, that maybe as an outside, third-party, that maybe we ought to wait for that conversation to end before engaging with one of those two individuals in a new conversation.

I don’t just butt in and interrupt other people’s conversations, in general or consistently.  I see no reason why I should have to tolerate this kind of behavior when other people do it.  Introvert or not, I don’t think I’m wrong here.  I’m not.