*Ode to Joy playing at full volume*

[yvannairie]

Ohhhhhhhhhhh my god my least favourite coworker is FINALLY quitting.

Thaaaank youuuuuuuuu.

EDIT: Let me just clarify -- I don't even dislike her! She's entirely okay as a person. It's just that over the past year it has become absolutely clear that she hated this job and was only doing the bare minimum at any given time -- as little as she could get away with, pretty much. In our new set-up like ours, someone is always picking up the slack, so it's in everyone's best interest to do the best work possible, and she could never get used to it.

On top of that, she is the kind of person who manages her stress through... venting, for the lack of a better word. She is a doomsayer and a gossip, and people like that grate me on a personal level, no matter how harmless they actually are.

So I'm just really hapy about this! She gets to change jobs, hopefully to something that doesn't make her as miserable as this one, and I never have to work with her again. It's a win-win!

Comments

[cimorene]

You are allowed to dislike people, though! Sometimes you can't help it.

Sometimes I can't even figure out why I dislike someone. 🤔

But honestly if you have a person being a resentfully lazy as possible, that's probably worse than someone you hate. The stress and extra work for everybody else is more persistent and inconvenient than those brief incidents of dislike that arise when you secretly loathe someone.

[yvannairie]

Oh yeah, this was definitely the nice version of the celebrations b/c I try to acknowledge that people can act in irritating ways and not be, like. Bad people. In private I celebrated this with... a lot less courtesy towards her, lol. (Also I'm really playing down some of her more obnoxious behaviours b/c I dislike talking about people behind their back, y'know?)

Thanks for the reality check, though :'3 I fully admit, sometimes I have difficulties disliking things just because I dislike them. The justification syndrome runs strong in me.

[cimorene]

This is a part of Finnish culture, IMO, wanting to be fair (which often means impartial) not just about disliking things but about everything. I call it "Fairness Kink". It's not really a kink obviously, it's just... a culturally validated preference. Finnish culture sets a very high value on justice and fairness and following rules & thus also on being INTERNALLY fair, even inside your own mind, which I think is probably a side-effect. It's an important skill of course, realizing that our perspective isn't the only one and that one's own preferences and opinions aren't universal truths or absolute standards. And that's mostly a good thing, but the habit of checking everything for fairness can result in striving to be impartial even about matters of taste.

[yvannairie]

Wow. Read for dirt in my own house :'DD

You're not wrong about this being a Finnish thing, though. My upbringing has really hammered into a gut thing for me, the idea that if I'm ready to say something about someone else, I need to be ready to say it to their face to give them a fair shake at saying it back. Talking behind people's back about their shortcomings is just... I can't not feel bad about it, pretty much. I feel like righteousness in the face of unfairness is often the only emotional outlet we allow for ourselves, being as f'n emotionally repressed as we are.

I guess that in my coworker it manifested in the constant complaining about how things weren't fair for her somehow? And on a gut level, I can relate to that experience but the facts were really not in her favour about it.

[cimorene]

Hahahha. Well! To be fair I think the idea that talking behind people's backs is bad is fairly universal even to highly non-rule-abiding cultures that are very bad at waiting patiently in line (Americans, latinx /Mediterranean cultures known for low personal space and talking over people). I mean that doesn't stop anybody from DOING it because it's probably a universal impulse (and I suppose logically it would be nearly impossible to get society working if it didn't exist at all), but there's public disapproval of it to various degrees that in practice plays out in different ways (eg some cultures think it's okay to talk behind people's backs as long as it's only in private; some internalize a strict do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do splitting where people are highly encouraged both to absolutely verbally deny that it's ever ok to talk shit about people AND to talk shit about people but to be careful to limit the amount so they don't get caught...)

...but of course the more concerned you are with abstract justice, personal ethics inside your own head and making yourself as fair as possible, and the value of rules and social norms... the more you are going to take that to heart. I mean there are definitely plenty of Finnish people who cheerfully talk shit behind everybody else's backs, though perhaps a smaller %... the difference is more in how everybody else around them generally reacts to it. (More disapproving, but of course because of fairness kink, it's weighted towards silent disapproval. Coming out too strongly against it, even when they think it's morally wrong and unfair, maybe seems risky?)

++ Kinda OT but constant complaining about how things weren't fair for her somehow: this is standard for self-centered people (and hence it's one of the most recognizable qualities of severe narcissists like Trump). I mean, we can all relate to it probably, it's just the more self-centered someone is, the more skewed their concept of 'fair' because they genuinely fail to perceive the context. In fact, there was a severely alarming coworker at my last job who was obsessed with things not being 'fair' to her and had a complete tantrum in the middle of the warehouse and physically tried to manhandle me away from the communal radio to prevent me from turning the volume down after she had turned it up to 100%. (LOL.)

[yvannairie]

... not to use this as a chance to complain about my own culture but it really frustrates me that yeah, Finnish disapproval is heavily codified to involve lots of silence, icy glares, and not joining in -- things that do nothing to actually stop the offending behaviour, and if you actually speak out, then ta-da! Now you're the offending party for breaking the rule of courtesy.

[cimorene]

Yeah... there are situations where that kind of disapproval works... but unfortunately (a) it tends to not work on a subset of people who find those cues harder to notice, both naturally and learnedly; and (b) it's easier for people to wilfully ignore if they feel like it.