Nothing will ever help me better to understand people. I don’t get them. Their way of thinking is strange.
Next week is the first week of class. This is a crazy time for department chairs. It’s almost as bad as the last week of class. There is a ton of work. There’s one crisis after another.
Suddenly, people hear a rumor that there might be a reallocation of secretaries. The department chairs decide to have a two-hour meeting on Tuesday to discuss our proposal to the administration regarding this.
By absolute accident, I happen to know that the reallocation already happened. Paperwork was signed. Contracts were redrawn. It’s a done deal.
Like the eternal innocent that I am, I tell the other chairs about this. A meeting will be a waste of time, I tell them. Unfortunately, it’s too late. It was all decided while we were off campus for the holidays. We can save ourselves the trouble of taking out time on an unusually busy day. We can concentrate on our many daily tasks instead.
Of course, as anybody with a bit less going on in the naiveté department could predict, exactly zero people agree with me. No, we should still have a meeting, they argue.
But why? For what purpose? The secretaries are gone anyways. Reallocated. Removed.
Because, the other chairs respond, it’s going to be a good experience to come together in solidarity and mutual care even if nothing practical comes out of it.
Everybody looks at me like I’m weird for not understanding this. There’s a collective agreement that coming together in solidarity and mutual care for a 2-hour unnecessary meeting is a great idea. These are people who are perpetually overworked to the point of public crying jags versus the very well-rested me who spends part of each working day reading, snoozing, or doing German exercises in the department lounge.
Definitely, somebody is weird in this situation.
Clarissa's Blog 
“people who are perpetually overworked to the point of public crying jags”
Perhaps that’s the answer? They’re poor at time management and that means a meeting, where nothing is required of them, is a break?
-ethyl (don’t trust my theory on this: it’s just as mystifying to me)
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It seems like these meetings actually bring them pleasure. It’s incomprehensible to me.
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Seems plausible.
People at church keep trying to get me to join the ladies’ group. I politely decline. It is… this, all the time. OK, time to have a long meeting about something that’s already been decided! And there’s the added bonus that there’s no published rulebook, but if I accidentally violate any of the fifty thousand unspoken, unwritten rules, everybody will be offended! Whee! What amazing fun I must be missing out on!
-ethyl
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I feel this. Once a chair was complaining that doing inventory was so onerous that she was getting suicidal. I tried to be helpful by sharing that I don’t do inventory. I ask every colleague to do their own. I thought this easy solution would be welcomed by the group. Instead, people reacted like I broke some huge social taboo. I haven’t made any helpful suggestions since then but I still have no idea why people didn’t like this one.
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Oh! I know that one!
The rule is:
-When women complain, they are just venting. They don’t want help, and they don’t want a solution to the problem. And if you try to offer them help, this will remind them of their husband/ex/boyfriend who they are currently on the outs with because he, also, tried to solve her problem when she complained but didn’t want a solution. Now you have inadvertently joined yourself to the psychic miasma that is her long-simmering fight with some man you’ve never met. All the bad feelings she has toward her ex: they’re focused on you like a laser cannon now.
I’m not at all sure what they do want. I try to make sympathetic noises unless they *explicitly ask for help* and even then, it’s a coin-toss whether helping is the right response, or deeply offensive. “Take this bucket and wipe the tables” is usually safe. Anything less concrete is fraught with danger.
-ethyl
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Oh. I really stepped into it. OK.
I usually know not to do it but I thought we were in work mode. Seeing as we were at work. Working. Or so I thought.
But it does make sense. They did look at me like I was a representative of the patriarchy oppressing them their whole lives.
This is very complicated for me.
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You’re not alone!
I had to have this one explained to me multiple times, because I’m a really special kind of stupid when it comes to other women.
My favorite one is when I need a thing. An object, info, whatever, that some other lady has access to. I start asking around, who has access, who do I have to talk to? I think I’m being some shrewd detective and pat myself on the head. I finally track down the right person: the one with access. I ask for the thing, and… I can’t get a yes or no, or any kind of clear answer. I get a blizzard of irrelevant verbiage. Feelings. Personal circumstances. Some thing that happened last week with her family pet. None of which has anything to do with my request. I’m not asking for plutonium– there’s no logical reason why I can’t have access to the thing, or the information, and no explanation forthcoming, but I’m not getting it. Maybe I still need the secret password?
So then I construct some scrappy and resourceful (I thought) workaround to solve the problem myself, outside of official channels.
And then I get torn a new orifice for violating some kind of institutional chain of command I didn’t know existed.
There ought to be a stupid trophy for getting into this scenario *more than once* and still not having any clue what is going on, or how to avoid it.
I don’t suppose you know the secret password?
-ethyl
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LOL, the best explanation of the differences between and amongst the sexes minus the typical technical jargon is by Sarah Hoyt. Sarah has complaints similar to both of you and also my late wife. Not quoting, but she suggests that our mothers dump us with a hormonal bath during pregnancy, and the resulting differences are due to the timing and extent of varying hormones.
She also visualized the behavioral differences in thought processes due to contacts between the hemispheres of the brain, male linear, simple a-b-c, female, complex, essentially a web. This too is essentially correct as we currently understand it. Now some female scientists amongst us claim that this allows an increased female ability to multi-task, but being laughing rat bastard misogynists to the core, we suggested maybe scatter-brained or quite possibly, even completely shorted out ;-D
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“help me better to understand people. I don’t get them”
How long have you been on our planet?
I can think of a few reasons for the behavior you find so puzzling/wrong.
The first has to do with systems of power. There is an established system and within that system people mostly know where they are. Nonetheless, they like to have a bunch of… fallback positions. This is why many employed people go out of their way to maintain occasional relationships by the occasional friendly chat, or going out for coffee together. People are assuring themselves that the structure is steady and sussing out possible escape routes if it’s not.
In times of turbulence (like top-down edicts that affect those who have no input) they naturally want to touch base with each other, again to see how solid the structure is and to evaluate possible allies/enemies.
If I didn’t know you sort of from your blog, I’d assume from your behavior that you were either perfectly okay with the decision or maybe even partially behind it or that you already have a new job lined up and are just running out the clock until you dump that joint.
Also, in NAmerica people tend to see their workplace as a kind of sports team (sports metaphors are very entrenched in the daily life of English speaking countries). Traditionally at work in the US, the active metaphor is an American football game. In this case the other team scored a last minute touchdown before halftime and one player wanders off to listen to murder podcasts while his teammates are trying to keep their spirits up… you’re letting the team/side down (to mix national metaphors).
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I don’t have a new job lined up, although I’d definitely accept one. But it’s true that I was not unhappy with the secretary being taken away. We have such an insane system of hiring clerical help and then relating to the people hired that it’s kind of easier not to have them at all. We’ve gone through 4 department secretaries in my time here, and every single one has been a curse. It’s got to the point where I celebrate when she says she needs a day off. I’m counting days until she’s gone. It feels like I’ve done a 6-year prison sentence and suddenly got an early release.
It’s almost as if the hiring structure is messed up on purpose to have people willingly give up clerical support.
But leaving this specific situation aside, I still find it extremely annoying that we have these weekly meetings to blow off steam about whatever is happening. People speak strongly and passionately about things. And it never changes anything. I find the whole exercise very humiliating. Like we are humored to spout off so that we’d get pacified like babies. Yet people eagerly participate. For years. I understand the sports metaphor but I don’t feel that this is my team. Or my side. Neither is the administration.
It’s hard to be more thoroughly alienated from one’s workplace than I am. We are there for different purposes, is the problem.
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“People speak strongly and passionately about things. And it never changes anything”
That’s not the purpose. The purpose is about social connections and self-image.
“It’s hard to be more thoroughly alienated from one’s workplace than I am”
The curse of neoliberalism…. turning promotion of self-into a cottage industry means that individuals are as isolated in their work as…. weavers or potters used to be.
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What I went into academia for, I can’t find it here. I manufacture a vague semblance of it alone in my office but beyond that, it’s not there. People gathered here for a completely different purpose. Which is their right, of course.
It’s lonelier than it was for a medieval weaver because he had his guild and could get together with people to talk about professional stuff.
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“What I went into academia for, I can’t find it here”
Does it exist anywhere? Serious question. Is there a job some place that would give you what you want or would it be a different set of adjustments you’d have to make?
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It exists but it has to be a place that requires a book and 5 articles for tenure. I read other places’ tenure requirements like some people browse through pictures of exotic resorts.
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