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February 17, 2004
mollifier. obfuscator.
at work, i sometimes (often?) take the role of middlewoman. i mollify; i placate. i listen sympathetically. i attempt to explain the behavior of the offending person to the offended. i try to get each person to understand what the other is trying to tell them.
suddenly today i realized that that's not a strategy i can use any longer. there's a deep communication gap between two of my co-workers that i've been attempting to fill without even really realizing the extent of my role. today after an edifying discussion with one of the parties, i realized that i have to stop.
and when i stopped, things got bad. bad, bad. i hate conflict. i avoid it studiously. that's almost certainly my main motivation to be the middle person.
i also wonder if this is a gender thing. it's a traditional female role to placate, to listen and sympathize, right? i'm the only woman now in a small group of five.
i realized too that my attempts at being the in-between person have served to hide the extent of the problem between these two. that's surely bad.
i haven't felt so anxious at work since the days when martin was in the group. (martin was as close to truly insane as any co-worker i've had. it turned out that he was an undiagnosed diabetic which was definitely part of the problem. his irrational rages still live in infamy. he once for some reason felt it was ok to tell me that he'd had a dreams in which he'd had sex with his mother.)
i don't know what will happen. my hope is that from the flames of the current conflict some kind of new understanding between these two can be forged, something that wasn't possible with me standing between them.
i have a squirrley bug to fix tomorrow and i just want to be able to concentrate. i guess that's my choice, though.
Posted by lisa at February 17, 2004 10:20 PM | TrackBack
ok, so a) your comment won't post right away because i have to approve it first and b) you might get a server error but your comment probably posted anyway and c) previewing doesn't work so i've removed the preview button.