ORG offered an optional seminar last Friday called How to Work with People. I wasn't going to go. But one of my co-workers had signed up and she was feeling self-conscious because she was the only one on our team who was going.

"I don't want to be the only one who signed up for a class on people relations—it's going to look like I need stress management techniques on how to work with my team—like I'm not happy with my team or something."

Hmmm… Someone's working awfully hard to nix a 'misconception' that nobody really had until she put it out there. But I'm a people pleaser, so I agreed to go.

The first thing the facilitator did was to make us write down three things about our communication style that we considered negative. I wrote down that I:

1.        Mask shyness with an artifical demeanor;

2.        Have a general lack of confidence when approaching people; and

3.        Sometimes have a difficult time keeping to the point.

Next, we were told to pick a partner (someone NOT sitting next to us—ARGH). We were allotted four minutes apiece to discuss what we wrote down with one another.

I chose the woman sitting on the other side of my coworker. We'll call her Flo.

"Do you want to go first?" I offered.

"Yeah? No, no—you go fuhst," she countered enthusiastically in her thick foreign accent.

"Okay…" I said, "…my first one is that I sort of mask shyness by being sort of fake—"

"—oh, I'm noht shy at OHLL. No, I just say whatevah is ohn my mind—I just put it out deyah."

"Oh yeah? …um… for my second one, I put that I have a general lack of confidence when approaching people—"

"—oh, I don't have dat prohblem at OHLL, I just tohk to whooevah, whenevah. I don't mind—I just say what I need to say and dat's dat."

When she spoke she made wild hand gestures, which wasn't a big deal except she was holding a small cluster of grapes in her right hand at the time. I flinched every time she made a point of emphasis, fully expecting to be pelted in the forehead with a loose grape.

"Yeah… I'm just sort of shy I guess—"

"—not me—nooo. I teenk it 'as someteeng to do wid de fact dat I was de youngest of eight cheeldren. I was spoilt and encouraged to speak my mind."

"…um—my last one is that I sometimes focus too much on the details and get away from the main point—"

"—OHHHHH, I'm not like dat at OHLL!! I hate dat—I jus' wan' people to get to de point—I don' wan' to know all de little details. Jus' give me de necessary infohmation and den git on wid it."

Like I said, I'm a people pleaser, so I felt obligated to try and relate on some level.

"Oh—well... I am sort of like that in my editing. Most of the documents I work on have excessive prepositional phrases. It's like they found THE most round-about way to say something relatively simple. So I can relate a little bit in that respect—"

"—see, DAT'S what I'm talkin' 'bout," she nodded at me. 

The facilitator interrupted to let us know that it had been about four minutes, so we should turn it over to our partners. Ironic, no?

After another four minutes of the same, the facilitator divided us into four groups based on our answers to a few simple questions. Each group sat in a different corner of the room. On her easel she divided a giant piece of paper into four equal quadrants. Socializers took the top left quad, Directors took the top right quad, Thinkers took the bottom right quad, and Relators took the bottom left quad.

Flo was a director. I was a thinker. Over the next several hours, we learned typical behavior patterns for our groups. Many of them were right on (for example, she said that directors are often considered bullies). As she presented behavior patterns, Flo would gesture to me from across the room. If it was a behavior pattern for a thinker, she would look at me, point her finger at herself, and shake her head aggressively. If we were discussing a behavior pattern for a director, she would laugh proudly, point to herself, and nod vigorously.

I simply smiled back with my negative communication style 1.

When we returned to our seats, she gave my shoulder a good, firm push and laughed heartily without saying anything. She obviously enjoyed the exercise.

Sadly, I think the exchange was retroactive; it only drove us further into our respective behavior patterns. She was the conversational bully, and I was the spineless counterpart. The purpose of the exercise was to achieve some level of self-awareness because it's supposed to be half the battle. 

The incident made me wish I was more confident. I'm not shy with people I know—I'm just horrible when it comes to meeting new people, and I'm especially timid in "professional" environments.

I'm haunted by a situation that occurred during my last week doing project support at ORG's main office. I was working with my primary project manager on a conference to showcase all of the services ORG offers. This project manager is a very scattered person, partially by nature and partially due to the fact that she is overworked.

She was so busy that month that she had to put off most of the work for the showcase until the weekend before the Monday it was to occur.

That particular morning, my cell phone was beeping at me, begging to be charged. Upon entering the office I was greeted with,

"Oh there you are—I just left you a voicemail—I figured you were in the parking lot—can you do me a favor?—I need you to take this box of binder-inserts to Kinko's and get them three-hole punched—I couldn't find any three-hole punch paper to print on ANYWHERE—anyway, there may be a line, but the actual job shouldn't take very long—they have this big drill that just use to drill through the whole stack—so just wait there for it—here's our account number for Kinko's—call me if you have any trouble."

"Okay," I said, simply. I was used to her hectic work-style.

I turned off my cell phone since I wouldn't have time to plug it in and drove to Kinko's with my box of paper. I walked inside and there was no line. Great, I thought—this will take no time at all.

I heaved the box up onto the counter. I told the guy what I needed.

"Hey Fred, how long to three-hole punch..." he evaluated the box quickly, "around 5,000 sheets?"

Fred whipped his ponytail around looking annoyed. He thought for a nanosecond before responding,

"Two hours."

Crap.

"Okay," I said hesitantly, knowing this would NOT be okay with my project manager. I reluctantly walked toward the door and turned my cell phone back on, hoping it had enough juice left for me to get further instructions. As I stepped out onto the sidewalk, my project manager answered,

"Hey Fenny, [BEEP]at's up?"

"Um… they say it's going to take two hours..."

"Ahhh..." she said, as if she had just been shanked in the side.

"What sh[BEEP]ld I do?" I asked.

"Um—first? Cry. Then, if that doesn't work, just ask them if there's any way they can bump it up—remind them we do a lot of business there. [BEEP] is very, very, very important. Did you get the guy's name? Did you notice manager or supervisor on his nametag or anything like that?"

"Uhhh—not really… I don't kno[BEEP]."

"Well, go talk to him again and see if they can't have it done in at least an hour. We have to have it by then at the very latest. And if they can't commit to that then we'll just have [BEEP] call them every ten minutes until it's done."

Oh God.

"I'll talk to him," I said, anxiously.

I hung up the dying phone, took a deep breath, walked back inside, and timidly approached the counter.

"Um, is there ANY way you could maybe have that job done by nine? We sort of need it for a conference this afternoon and..."

"—we'll have it done just as SOON as we can--really. But there are like five or six jobs ahead of yours."

And you know, the truth is that's enough for me. I just don't have what it takes to haggle the Kinko's guy and still be able to sleep at night.

I looked at his tag. Hector. No indication of manager or supervisor status. I made a mental note. On the way to the office, I called my project manager again.

"Hey Fenny, wh[BEEP] did he say?"

"Um, he really wouldn't commit to anything other than to say they would get it done just as SOON as they could."

"Okay, well we'll just [BEEP] to keep calling then."

CRIMINY.

Back at the office, I was required to call Hector every ten minutes to ask about the status of the job. We made a game of it, Hector and me. He would ask me for my name and put me on hold to go check the job. Then he would come back to the phone and tell me he didn't have a job listed under that name, and I would remind him that it wasn't really a job, job, but just a three-hole punch job. I guess they had just labeled it the three-hole punch job for the pale chic who looked like she was going to throw up every time she spoke.

The third time I was required to call, I seriously considered begging Hector tearfully and whispering into the receiver that my project manager was giving me 15 minutes to produce the three-hold-punched inserts or she was going to cut off my left pinky.

On the fifth call, he told me the job was finished. A wave of relief came over me followed by irritation that he hadn't called me yet. Then I wondered if Kinko's workers have methods of retaliation against their clients, like food service workers. I mean, I suppose they could spit between random pages of the inserts. And I wouldn't blame them. I might do something like that if I had to deal with customers like me and my project manager.

The fact is, I simply don't agree with putting that kind of pressure on them. They can't just push someone's job to the front of the list because the project manager is on a deadline and they maybe weren't as prepared as they could have been.

But that incident came to mind at the seminar. You know what else came to mind?

An episode of one of my favorite cartoons where a kid gives perfume as a birthday gift to his crush, and he accidentally sprays her in the eyes as he's handing it to her. She runs away angrily, while he wrings his hands anxiously and screams,

"I-am-so-AWKWARD!"

Yeah, that pretty much says it.