astercontrol:

after several years working in an industry where every task can have very serious bad effects if done wrong, but every task is also extremely complex and requires many steps, most of which are done by people who do not understand the full process

…I have developed a paranoia-level awareness that anything I do could later get questions like “who told you to do that and why??”

and if I don’t have a ready answer, it is assumed that I just… decided to do it, out of nowhere

and if the thing was done wrong– or even if someone somewhere thinks it was done wrong– that’s negative points against my perceived competency as an employee

Which means I’ve developed a habit of making very thorough documentation of who told me to do things and what they said their reason was

(especially if I can’t get them to explain it in a way I fully understand)

(a thing that happens a lot in my workplace, where my questions rarely seem to get answered, because there is always a communication gap where everyone is only half listening to me and answering something vaguely adjacent to what I actually said)

However.

this rigorous documentation can also, unfortunately, get interpreted as being “hostile” toward coworkers and trying to “push blame onto them”

and can lead to several wasted hours of getting yelled at and interrupted and misinterpreted some more as I try to explain my reasoning

sigh.

guess my documentation is gonna go in private notebooks from now on.

…..I think I’ve figured out what was eating so much at my brain

The fact that the attitude they were accusing me of having…. was sooooo similar to the attitude they have toward other departments of the same workplace.

And when they kept going “we are a team! We should be working together as a team!” the unspoken ending was “so we should not be treating each other the way we treat those OTHER teams.”

… and there it is.

Hadn’t immediately picked up on this, because this sort of workplace rhetoric is usually treated as a sports metaphor, and I don’t know jack about sports.

But I know that a sports “team” is defined by the fact that it’s united in opposition to other teams.

Which– on the field or in the office– are made up of people very much like you… doing the same kind of work, in the same kind of places… with basically the same objectives in terms of what their job does for the rest of the world…

But they’re not YOUR team. So they’re your enemy.

Yyyeah.

….Guess this is what I mean by not being a team player.

(Or a competitive-game person of any kind, really. My fun activities are all art and creativity, and when I want to cooperate I want to cooperate for the good of EVERYONE.)

(So… I feel probably about how post-82 Encom Tron feels about games.)

(Which I’m sure has nothing at all to do with our parallel traumas in the 1980s, and the similarity of PE and MCP.)