Someone Else Will Enjoy Her Presence – Part 2

I didn’t think there was going to be a Part Two to my last entry, but damn, here we are.

Yesterday at work, I had gotten roped into a conversation about the extent to which I like to engage with new people and whether I’m willing to assist in training them.  To put it quite simply, I don’t.  Years ago, I was open to the experience.  For some reason, now in 2023, I have zero interest in trying to help the next line of workers to learn the ropes and get acclimated to what we do.  I can’t explain why, at least not logically.  What I can do is explain it using emotions and feelings.

I can’t stand the training unit.  Yes, there is some intense dislike there and I don’t deny it.  The training unit is the team of individuals who are responsible for getting the new people trained and ready for the rigors that the job brings with it.  Everyone in the training unit, at least to me, comes off as standoffish and is generally unlikeable.  I would sooner just avoid them completely rather than work with them or any of their people.  I don’t feel like getting to know any of them better.  I don’t want to know why they train people the way they do.  I don’t feel like giving any of them the proverbial benefit of the doubt.  I would just prefer not to have anything to do with them.  So what this means is that all of these new people are going to have to learn things without me.  Now, I don’t mean for any of this to sound like I know everything, because I assure you that I don’t.  I’ve been at this job for a long time and the prevailing thought is that I know A LOT.  Again, I would never word it that way, but sometimes that’s just how I tend to be described and there’s really nothing I can do to change it.  That’s just how I am seen in my office environment.

Then the question came up and this kind of goes along with my last entry, “Someone Else Will Enjoy Her Presence”.  I was asked something along the lines of, “Well, if that’s the case, why are you training Serena then?”  I should have anticipated this question, but I didn’t.  I guess I assumed that no one would have noticed that, yes, Serena and I had been spending time together since the beginning of May.  I don’t remember what my response was at the time, but whatever I said in the moment yesterday, was assuredly not the truth.

I think I said something along the lines of, “She was and is the last person I’ve decided to train.  She managed to get to me before I made my decision to end all of my involvement with training new people.  It was a matter of timing really”.  The first line of that response is the only accurate statement of the three.  Those last two are bullshit.

It was never a matter of timing.  When Jackie left at the end of April, that was when I made my decision to cease all involvement with training people and allowing new people to “shadow” me and accompany me in my adventures.  If I think about it, again from an emotional perspective, I think that with Jackie leaving, I didn’t want to get close to anyone again.  Jackie’s leaving was inexplicably painful, a lot more than I would have ever anticipated.  I figured it would be best to run solo again and do my job on my own, without a partner, or “work wife”, as is the term I have come to utilize.

Serena had attached herself to me days after Jackie left and she got to me in such a way that I couldn’t help but notice.  There was something about Serena that I liked and I seemed to take to her well before the end of May.  Serena likes to remind me that at some point during that month, I had told her that I would take her under my wing.  This seemed to put her mind at ease and maybe this is what started her journey towards investing in me as her personal workplace “trainer”.  As the weeks and months went by, I got to know Serena to where I felt that she would be a worthy work wife, to where she had agreed to become Work Wife #4.

One of the biggest obstacles we had to overcome and are still working through today would be her still undergoing the classroom portion of her training.  She is slated to finish the classroom education part of her training in mid-October.  This means that her time in the office is really limited, being that she’s been doing the classroom training sessions up to three times per week.  That schedule doesn’t leave much time for us to spend together, so that I can teach her how to do the job in the real world.  The time apart has been challenging, but I thought that we were dealing with it well, or at least, as best we could.  Those classroom training sessions are a necessary evil and nothing that we could readily circumvent.

So then (and in going back to my previous entry), why would Serena have made the comment she did, even in jest, about how other people “enjoy her presence?”  She and I had conversed about the extent to which she could very well spend her days with other people, again, maybe in a joking fashion similarly at first.  But I made it clear to her, in as serious a tone as I could muster, that I was not looking to pair myself with anyone else in the office and I thought that she had made a similar assertion to me as well.  In my head, I thought this was the end of this whole “other people” idea.  She made it sound like she didn’t want to spend time with anyone else either.

As I said before, maybe I am overthinking this and thinking about it way too hard?  Although, on the other hand, what if Serena genuinely wants to spend time with other people and/or have someone else train her?  I can deal with all eventualities, but I will say this.

For the life of me, I don’t know why this happened.  But I will say that this experience, should it end the way I think it could, will definitely keep me away from getting close to anyone else.  I would just prefer not to deal with it, new people at work, or those who are in need of training.

This whole thing is just emotionally draining and more than I want to deal with again.  It’s has left me exhausted and I don’t think I want to do this anymore.