People always try to tell me that things happen for a reason and that I should look forward to better times, but I’ve always had a tendency to ruminate on the failures of the past often to an incredibly depressive degree and the older you get the less likely you see the future as evening out all of the slights of the past.
I had this Facebook chat with a friend of mine that threw me into an absurd funk for most of the last few days. It basically re-tore the one weak spot in our friendship and it left me really messed up.
We used to work together and she was the person that I chatted with the most on AOL during the day when things were slow. Neither of us work at that company anymore, but I asked her if she had talked to anyone that we used to mutually know and she mentioned this one guy, who I introduced her to, a guy I felt had stabbed me in the back and come between me and her in a bad way. When she told me that she’d had lunch with him, I told her that, though I understood that they were still friends, what had gone on between us still really bothered me.
She said, “You really have to let that thing go,” which has always been her opinion. She never seemed to understand just how hurt I was when the whole thing went down and how much it still bothered me.
My response was less than peaceful:
no actually i don’t
i’ll forgive him right after hitler
like what i did or didn’t do affected him enough to complain about me
fuck him
you however are still aces with me
The last real job I had was a really good opportunity for me that I managed to screw up. I’m not really made to work for a big company. I have tons of quirks; my sleep problems make me look half past dead all the time; and I have a singular inability to refrain from expressing honestly the first thing that pops into my head. You can get away with these quirks if you are producing big time, but like Jose Canseco found out once you fall somewhat below par, it’s nearly impossible to survive.
This job could have been a great situation for me, but I just never felt like things were going well. I longed for the day when they would finally accept that I was skilled and I could relax, feel comfortable and not have to worry every single day about my future.
This friend of mine was really cool to me. She assured me that she thought I was good at what I did and she invited me to parties even though I was a decade older than her and her friends. We pretty much shared all the ups and downs of working there.
Finally, it seemed like everything was getting better for me at work. I was given more responsibility and I actually worked harder for the next couple of months than I had the previous year and a half combined. Unfortunately for me, the market collapsed and the one weakness in my portfolio just ripped me to shreds. I lost a ton of money and the stress was back, but even worse than before. I kept telling myself to be a good soldier, but somehow I could just tell that I was back to square one in everyone’s eyes with little hope of rebuilding.
A little before this I had met this new hire and we became friends. He was in a side group and didn’t really know anybody and I felt that I had been really cool about introducing him around and inviting him out. I introduced him to my chat friend and they hit it off too. I’d been over to his house and I thought that we were on the way to becoming decent friends.
Then after the market crashed and I had lost a lot of money, I seemed to notice that he had no use for me anymore. He had basically stopped talking to me altogether. It wasn’t the case of us not being around each other. I could tell he wasn’t talking to me and I had no idea why.
Right around this time, the company came up with a new plan for the future. It was a pretty good deal, if they were giving you a lot of capital, but after my recent losses I found myself in worse shape than I was before my previous successes. I suppose I could have dug myself back out of the hole, but I was so weary and stressed from my previous struggles I just don’t think I had it in me.
Meanwhile, while I saw my stock plummeting, my chat friend became really excited about the reorganization. Eventually, I realized that she’d formed this secret odd work partnership with this other guy who no longer talked to me. It didn’t really bother me except for the fact that she had kept it a secret.
Now I had absolutely no idea why this dude had stopped talking to me. I asked her and knew that she had to know the reason, but she would always brush me off and say that she didn’t want to get into the middle of it.
The next few months were sheer torture for me. The people that I was around were mostly new hires, who seemed to know that I wasn’t someone an ambitious type should hang with. I felt like most of these people were suddenly treating me like I had the plague. I knew that I was doomed, but didn’t know how to pull out of the tailspin. To make matters worse, I was now neighboring with an aisle and the guy who mysteriously no longer talked to me.
While I was watching my last days play out, it seemed like everyone else around me was having a ball that I wasn’t part of, which made each day nearly unbearable. Previously, even when I’d been only semi-successful people seemed to enjoy having me around, but now it was just day after day of being ignored mixed in with more and more signals that my days were numbered.
I asked a bunch of my other friends at the company if they knew what this guy had against me. The whole thing was driving me insane. I’d been nothing but nice to this guy and he just suddenly stopped treating me like I was even in the same room with him.
I guess I could have asked him, but didn’t really want to give him the satisfaction of knowing how much it bothered me, and my other friend wouldn’t give me any answers or even listen to me when I told her how much it bothered me. I understood to a point that she wanted to be friends with both of us and not get in between, but as far as I was concerned it was pretty clear to me who was Hitler and she was being Switzerland.
Anyway, I was eventually fired and remain fairly hurt about it. Had I been a little luckier or more tactful or been able to deal with the stress better, it could have been a great situation for me. Later, I’d found out that not only had he disowned me, but he’d actually gone to our boss and complained about me, which boggled my mind. I’d been nothing but nice to this guy and my work results had nothing to do at all with his success. I still have no idea what his issue with me was, but there were guys there that I hated that I thought were completely incompetent, but I still treated them politely and would never in a million years go to their bosses and tear them down the way this guy had done to me.
About a year later, I was back in the building where I had worked, and this guy walks up to me and asked me how I was doing. I hadn’t seen him in a year.
My response was, “So you’re talking to me now?” Right as I said this, another guy he knew walked by and said, “Hello” to him. I waited for my confrontation to continue, but instead he just walked away with this other guy.
I told my other friend about this confrontation, and she again told me that I should get over it. I agree that maybe I shouldn’t have let the whole thing bother me as much, but there was no way that I’d just let this guy act as if nothing had transpired between us. She for some reason had no sympathy and it remains a sore spot between us.
It’s not like this guy got me fired, but he certainly didn’t help matters. At some point I sent him an email listing my grievances and asking what the hell he had against me. He never responded.
Silence is always the worst response. It drives you mad.
I suppose that I shouldn’t let it hurt my friendship with her, but the fact that she either doesn’t realize how hurt I was by the whole thing or doesn’t have any sympathy brings the whole thing back to the fore and is well on its way to ruining my weekend.
