Bad Manners and Brimstone

Sorry, week got away from me - Gellchom, you are right that a lot of this comes from my own anxiety. I’ve never been a go with the flow type of person to begin with, but I’ve been dealing with significant issues over the past two years at work and hit near-total burnout. I didn’t need medical care but it was a close thing. While I’ve been practicing to get past the fear, I totaled my car last year in December and I’m scared at night and at high speeds to drive.  I might have toughed it out but the not knowing is making it even worse - 10 guests means just my sister’s in laws who are pretty polite. 50 guests means my mom’s family who I’ve successfully avoided for almost 10 years now because they tend to look down on me for religious and physical reasons.  I didn’t really touch on those things in my post because my family doesn’t know that I’m in that bad of shape and I don’t want to tell them.

I was trying to see how “bad” I’d look if I didn’t go and a part of me was hoping the lack of organization for the event might give me a pass. You are also right STiG in that, I really love those kids and I’m angry at myself that I’m going to miss out on an event for them. But as of yet, even my parents haven’t booked a hotel because there hasn’t been a decision on where or even if the party is happening. It’s entirely possible that they’ll decide to do nothing at the last minute.  When I take all the circumstances into consideration, it’s just too much for one lunch.

STiG: my parents about 16 hours, or a 2-3 hr flight away from the location. They would be traveling anyways though as they want to attend a wedding ceremony and give condolences in person to someone. So I’d have to travel separately and they haven’t booked a room yet because they aren’t sure where they’ll need to be. My dad says hotels are easy to get around New Years so he isn’t worried. Otherwise they’d stay with family.

Sometimes there are strategic reasons to do this. For example, my manager kept asking me to give assignments, anything at all to someone who was basically not qualified to do much more than admin busy work which I didn’t need help with. It was annoying since it felt like I’d have been done with the tasks already in the time it took to set them up and train them to do it…until I realized that by giving them work, he could justify their jobs so that they wouldn’t be first in line for layoffs. In general, unless it is really going to harm your prospects, I’d take this as an opportunity to shed any less interesting assignments off to the others and build some goodwill with your boss. It’s a pretty easy “yes” to bank for the future.

I have a coworker, Tammy,  who is convinced I’m out to get her. If I offer critique on a document (it is my job) she takes it as a personal attack even when I had no idea the section had been written by her.  If I send an email, she over-interprets every word to mean the most awful thing you could come to. She is convinced that I am mean and frequently inserts herself into completely innocuous interactions with other coworkers as if she is a white knight defending them from my abuse. You are probably wondering - well NyaChan, are you being mean? i know no one can claim perfection, least of all me, but to give an example…

 She recently confronted me about supposedly making someone feel horrible via email. What she didn’t realize is that the person she was claiming was hurt is actually a good friend of mine and we’d been communicating about the underlying work without trouble. According to Tammy, I said in my email that she’d done a bad job on work that was submitted. My actual language?  I merely stated that I’d need to review and do some edits on a document that was submitted. Which I do for all submitted work btw (that’s my job) and I only wrote the email because the doc was longer than usual, so I’d need my friend to take over a different task so I could finish the review in time for an unexpected deadline change for our team. Pretty big jump to get from one to the other in my opinion and it wasn’t a jump my friend actually made (I double checked to make sure she wasn’t upset), When that friend heard what Tammy had said to me, she made a 45 min trip to my house to drop off a care package and a card reminding me not to let people push me around and that I have friends who have my back (she is a very kind person).

Regardless, Tammy had no problem making personal attacks on my character privately and even when I’ve asked her for examples or how she’d have preferred I handle an interaction that upset her, she can’t tell me and instead resorts to “I’m not the only one who thinks this about you!” Of course no one else is there or complaining but according to her that’s just because I’m so intimidating that people are too scared to talk to me. I have checked in with people I trust to tell me the truth and ran emails by them before sending them and even when others sign off on the language as neutral and professional, she gets very upset.

But that is all behind closed doors. She only speaks like that to me when I’m alone or with my counterpart who she also dislikes but not nearly as much as me. In meetings with others, she is sweet as pie and acts like she didn’t just call me disrespectful, discourteous, unprofessional and so on less than a day ago. She’ll even try to make small talk with me about my weekend or the weather  and it’s that part which I don’t know how to handle. Everything in me wants to be icy cold and not share any information because I don’t like her acting like she is friendly or to have more info to use against me. But I don’t want to look like I’m being mean to her out of nowhere because I doubt any of the rest of the attendees except for one person I know she gossips with know there is a conflict.

  What level of interaction seems appropriate given the circumstances? What will seem “normal” enough to get through these conversations without looking bad but not being completely fake?

I think you referencing your neighbor outright probably put people off. Had you instead said “I’m planning on using trellis/landscaping to create some more privacy and block views of trash bin storage” without complaining about how your neighbor chooses to store his bins, you probably wouldn’t have gotten such a bad reaction. To be honest, it would have put me off too.

I feel like I’m missing something - why wouldn’t you tell them who the faculty member was when sending the email or when he inquired? When I read the exchange, yes he sounds obnoxious, but you also seem to be unnecessarily withholding information you did have and it wasn’t unreasonable to wonder or ask for it in my opinion. If it’s just that you don’t want to respond due to the time and logistics of communicating second hand info to do many people , that I totally understand, but again, you chose to respond when you could have just ignored it. I think o agree that having a generic account for student news is probably a good idea. It’s out of the ordinary in my experience to receive emails from an individual who does answer some emails from that account to say Please do not reply on other emails.

When my dad paid off my student loans as a gift, he told me that was the gift and then we both sat down together on a later day over the  phone and he took care of it online.  I think your approach was a good one!

I’ve attended several weddings like this and they were fine. The food was from the same caterer - they didn’t have different menus (at least not in the communities Ive lived in) and it really isn’t a big deal to have separate reception halls if you are from that type of community. It’s just how some people choose to plan and for brides who wear hijab or have family members that do, it can be more comfortable for them and allow them to dance/party freely.  These weddings tend to be family parties - as in anyone who is invited comes with spouses, parents, kids and so on. A single person would not typically be offered a plus one as those circles often don’t recognize relationships outside of marriage or long term relationships so it’s not a huge number of strangers or new partners wandering alone in their section of the wedding - they’d be people who know the bride and groom too.

Now in my family, we don’t do this and never have because we are religious/culturally aware but not nearly as much as others (not sure how to describe it…we don’t make it a big focus of our daily life let’s say). We do mixed gatherings as that’s our preference and these separated weddings feel really old fashioned to us in the states (not so much overseas where it’s common and expected). But it’s the bride and groom’s choice so if invited, we go and have a good time.

I’ve been on the receiving end of this too many times myself with my family and I’ve adopted the same policy. They start talking with each other rather than include me for more than what’s necessary (“did you put out the trash” or something understandable that can’t wait) and I politely end the call. Sometimes they notice, sometimes they don’t - in fact they’d left the phone in one room and walked into another and I was talking to no one for a while lol I don’t feel too guilty about it.

ETA: I did have one frank conversation about it which helped, but occasionally still happens