Other stops along the line

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

08: Disappointment

It's a remarkably human thing for someone who is looking for a response to ignore the response that they're being given because it doesn't match what they are expecting to hear. People who work in public-facing positions know this intrinsically, and often have to devote considerable resources and time to making sure that what is happening in front of them is not a failure to understand, but instead a decision not to accept what they understand. That particular insistence on a wrong position being correct generally only comes out when there's money involved. Even so, good places that deserve repeat business are willing to work with people when it's genuine mistakes that have been made, or someone realizing that they've ordered the wrong size shirts to surprise someone with.

I, on the other hand, rarely am dealing with money matters, and instead there's a lot of "oh, I did return that book, I remember doing so" and a fair amount of "Oh, shit, I think I returned that book to City Library System instead of you, County Library System." On that last one, I can reassure them that things will get back to their proper places in some amount of time, because this happens very frequently and we trade materials between ourselves on the regular.

What I encountered recently was, instead, people who were expecting a specific response and didn't get it, and refused to hear what was actually being said, because it didn't match their expectations. I don't think it was malicious, since it was about getting information, but it does crop up regularly. A person who was asking about renewing a digital checkout, for example, kept insisting that they have never seen the thing I was describing to them in all the amount of time that they have been using the site, while I patiently kept trying to get through and say "that option doesn't appear until about three days before due date, and it should appear here, on this page," but it was at least three or four times around the block of "no, I've never seen that, I don't know what you're telling me" before I finally managed to get this person on a working situation. Mostly by having them first go to the spot where the thing would appear, and then explain that this is the spot where it will appear, but it will still have to be about three days before the due date before it will appear. And that it still might not appear if someone has a request in for it. I think that finally got through by having someone actually do the steps, instead of insisting that the thing that I know exists has never been part of their experience.

Same day, later on, someone is calling to get information about a half-remembered thing where one of the local Christian megachurches put on something like a "Living Christmas Tree" and they wanted to know what the details would be about getting tickets for the program. I found the thing, a Singing Christmas Tree, and which church it was associated with, and there was a nice note on their homepage saying "Hey. We know that we've done things in the past that have been big spectacles, but this year, we're taking a different tactic and giving you awesome Christmas experiences for each Sunday in December. No tickets, no cost, just Christ." Which I relayed to the person on the telephone, and they wanted to know about the ticket cost and the performance dates. And so I gave them the times for the Sunday services, and they said, "No, those are regular church times." And so we went through this information dance a second time before it went through and the person understood that the big extravaganza they were hoping to either get tickets for or relay information to someone else about was not going to happen, and then they hung up. A little bit more research, now that I had the right name, showed that the big extravaganza had finished up a final show in 2022, and so this hadn't been an actual thing for three years now. If that note hadn't been on the church's front page, I might have had a helluva time knowing that I had the right thing, even when I eventually would have discovered the article about the show hanging up after fifty years of performances. I'd be confident in my answers, but saying "no, that doesn't actually exist any more" is one of the answers that tends to get a more disbelieving answer. Probably because the expectation is that the answer will be something other than that. When that happens at work, I can either react to it with "well, I've disappointed someone," or with "just because I told you something other than what you wanted to hear does not mean that I'm the villain here!" Depending on how the interaction goes, it'll lean one way or another.

I took some serious psychic damage last week, when, because they were offering, I accepted a free roof and attic inspection from people looking to drum up business for their roof replacement services, thinking they might give me a good idea about the state of my roof. And what they gave back to me was the possibility that my roof was structurally failing and would need to be replaced, well ahead of the schedule that the original roofers had put in for it. And so, then they provided me with the sales pitch for their services, and after all of that, we started talking numbers, and that's at the point where I started giving pushback on the matter. The numbers that came in were "it'll cost you what it's cost you to get rid of your ex" numbers, and if there's one thing that has saved my ass multiple, multiple times, including when I was in a really bad headspace, is that I know, viscerally, what I can do with the resources I have available to me, and I can calculate and budget. This particular offer was going to be a non-starter, because I don't have that kind of slack in my budget. Ask again once I've paid off the loan I took out to get rid of my ex, and I still might tell you no. I explained to the now sales person what my situation was, and what kind of monthly payment might be within my ability, and then it was "well, I can take some money off of it up front, and give it back to you as a rebate, that'll let you get a few months into this, or you could use it for Christmas presents." While I was still having a complete despair of "my roof is falling apart and I definitely do not have the resources to do this replacement," I wasn't going to budge on the part where I had to actually be able to afford this situation, and in a battle of "pushy, get-to-yes salesperson versus Silver who knows what they have to work with," pushy salesperson loses. Especially pushy salesperson who is not listening to me about what I'm telling them. They left without their sale, and I threw up a flare to people who may have been able to finance such things about the situation in a panic.

Looking back on this, I realize that the emotions and issues I was feeling regarding this were the same kinds of emotions and things that I was feeling when my ex was pushing back on me to do something that we couldn't afford. I felt terrible because I was disappointing someone by not giving them what they wanted, and with my ex, my own disappointment at failing at capitalism was then reinforced with her disappointment or upsetness at not getting what she wanted. So, yeah, I was ready to blame myself for the roof falling in because I hadn't noticed the signs, and I hadn't put together anything for maintenance once I was actually back on my feet and more clear-thinking, and there wasn't going to be anything I could do about it, so I was just a disappointment to everyone, and this massive ADHD tax was just what I deserved. Those were some unhappy neural pathways, and they were definitely well-oiled from all the time I'd spent with my ex.

After I'd calmed down a little bit through the magic of sleep, I also decided to call the people who had put the roof on and see what their opinion of the situation was, and possibly to set up a maintenance contract so that I could get as much life out of my failing roof as before. Their person that came out explained to me what would need to be done to the roof to bring it back into good work, and with the idea that doing the work of getting the roof cleaned, and then treated, and changing some things so as to prevent water damage to brick work, and then reinsulating the attic, and things would be better. They also quoted me a price for all of this that was more in line with what I believed I had in wiggle room for my budget, so I accepted that, and set up the financing paperwork, and informed the people I'd sent the flare to about the situation changing and how I was feeling much more confident in my ability to make it work, based on the new and lower price that I'd been quoted for maintenance work instead of replacement work. So yet more time spent on the "all my money goes to making sure my house and my people are healthy and well, and maybe once all that gets paid off, I can think about possibly contributing more than the absolute minimum to retirement plans" situation, but I've been managing for aleph-null years now, so what's a few more.

I think my ambient "constantly disappointing others" and panic meter have been increased because of things happening at work. While I'm not in danger of being RIF'd, a lot of people around me are, and their disappearance will result in some serious rebalancing of the work that's going on, to the point where everyone, except upper administration, loses. The justifications for this have ranged from utter bullshit to rank bullshit, and despite all of the big and loud pushback they've received about how this set of changes (and all the other changes they've pushed on us) are the exact opposite of good public service and show a contempt for both the staff and the public that we serve, they continue to barrel forward with all of them. So there's heightened tensions around, as well as a certain amount of uncertainty about what's going to happen when the supposed deadlines roll around and the next set of changes gets put into action. There might be some ambient anxiety leaking out of my otherwise controlled self, because of all of this uncertainty, stubbornness, and general fucking-up of making change, communicating change, implementing change, and ignoring feedback about changes. If it persists, there may need to be conversations about establishing a more effective routine of anxiety dissipation, but for the moment, things are being managed. (Oh. There's another well-trod terrible neural pathway, the one that says that all the problems at my workplace are my fault. The manager who tried to get me fired instead of helping me establish good ways of work and reminders. The other supervisor who took away my collection management responsibilities because I made her look bad in front of upper management. The coworker who complained about various fidgets of mine to my supervisor. And all of that related material.)

I am still a disappointment to others, because sometimes other people expect something out of me that I cannot give them, or they expect me to work in ways that I cannot do. And sometimes because things slip through the cracks and I don't do the things that I said I would. (Or I got distracted.) And being a disappointment to others, outside of very specific and controlled circumstances, feels like a failure to live up to my potential, or more practically, that I am not a flawless and perfect being and therefore I can expect someone to make fun of me for that or otherwise express strong negative emotions at me for that. (Because my ex. And that manager. And the classmates in primary school.) And the only way to get out in front of that is to express stronger negative emotions first, and otherwise self-flagellate sufficiently that someone else doesn't need to. It's not a healthy way of looking at things, and breaking out of it will mean accepting a baseline principle that I have yet to see enough evidence of (or that I have enough self-confidence to assert in the face of a horde of biting weasels, take your pick): that I have worth as a person, regardless of what I do or don't do, regardless of how other people perceive me, and that worth is not conditional upon anything else.

You know, the kind of thing that other people take for granted as a part of themselves, and will look at you funny when you say that you're still working on that.

(But someone said, having come back to the library, that they still remember the people who were there when they were much smaller, and that they understand a little bit better now what we were doing and how we tried to help them, now that they're having to do academic work. So some of that help stuck, or at least they appreciate the help more now. Not a total disappointment, then.)