Social Engineering - Part 1

Over the past many weeks, I've been thinking a lot about relationships. Friends. Family. Friends that are more like family… The connections with people I have now. The ones I want to have. The ones that have faded away. And the ones I've chosen to move past.

But I guess I've always been interested in the how relationships and friendships work and can evolve/devolve over time. My freshman year was as exciting as it was intimidating. By that point in my life I had known for years that I was attracted to guys and in elementary school and even junior high it had been easy to hide from letting those feelings because dating anyone wasn't really an option. But high school, well that's when dating, going steady, making out, and awkward sex is pretty much expected to occur and because my high school was made up of about 150 students max—it was a church school—chances of finding a boy friend were slim to none. And coming out in high school, well that just wasn't an option. And to make matters worse for my homo hormones, the upper class guys were hot. They were also pricks and seemed very content to make this socially awkward teen feel all the more so. Except for one.

His name was Greg, a senior. He had an electric smile to compliment his friendly demeanor. He wasn't a jock, though he was athletic. He wasn't a geek, though I think he was smarter than he let on. He wasn't the BMOC (big man on campus) though he was well loved and could be seen frequently getting and giving hugs to everyone on campus. While too much time has passed to recall any specific moments, I do fondly remember a few times he would flash me a smile or a wink after I had endured the requisite taunting from his classmates letting me know no to worry about it. I vowed that during my next 4 years I would become the Greg of my tenure.

Squiggle dissolve a la Wayne's World to my senior year. I managed to reach graduation day without having to have a girlfriend, and obviously no boyfriend either, but I achieved my goal of being generally well liked by the student body and even the teachers. Looking back I realize now that such a goal had an unforeseen consequence, I ultimately didn't have any close/intimate relationships to show for my time there, not even after having some of the same classmates all the way back to first grade. Don't feel bad for me, I don't. I was happy—more or less—at the time even if I can't say I really miss those years now. While many people wish they could relive their high school days, I'm not one of them, I have no desire to relive the past or reconnect with those people now. I'm not the person they knew then.

So why the high school flashback? Well after putting in nearly five years of corporate office work, I'm able to confirm that aside from being paid to show up every day, it's more like high school than not. There's the same politics, cliques, rumors, backstabbing, a brain, a jock, a princess…I'm so Anthony Michael Hall (if he had a mullet) but this ain't no Breakfast Club. The stakes are much higher. Which is why it is sad that perceptions still rule over fact. I guess somethings will never change.

One of the perceptions that has me worried is how my relationships with others in the company are seen. Some of my coworkers are more than just coworkers, they're my friends. Right now I'm at a point in my life where the people who I'm closest to are coworkers, or previous coworkers. And that has me in a quandary. There's a lot of politics and social structure where I work, like high school. But unlike high school, this time it's not my goal to be friends with everyone. These days I'd rather just keep developing my current friendships so that when the inevitable change of department, company, or location occurs, those connections will still be there even if the actual people aren't. I find myself analyzing how these friendships are being viewed by other people, and I'm worried that they're being taken out of context. What sucks is that there's little that can be done about it, because people also see what they want to see. And then there's the people who use you to bolster their own careers. I really don't like the cut throat side of working in a corporate environment, but I'm not sure one can ever escape it.

Where does that leave me? On edge. Questioning my actions around the people I call friends, and the ones that aren't, and how each with view the other. Of course the workplace is meant for work, not social interaction, but humans are social beings by nature so eliminating the social element of working with people is just unnatural. Are developing personal friendships in the workplace a bad idea? Is it wrong to maintain a social relationship outside of work?

More to come… but in the mean time, leave your 2¢ in the comments.