Sometimes people surprise you.

After dealing with the extremely rude office staff yesterday, I emailed my doctor. I didn't out and out say what a horror the woman was, but I said, "unfriendly and unhelpful". Oh well. Needless to say, he writes back, apologizes for them, takes full responsibility and will be having a chat with them later on. Nice. :-)

On a separate topic--yesterday was a bit rough for me. Besides dealing with idiot office staff, I occasionally have to deal with idiot co-workers. Let me say this: I love my job, I love my boss and I love about 80 percent of the people I work with. It's the 20 that is driving me up a wall these days. Some people are neverhappy, they love to complain, they think it's their job to give everyone "feedback" (which is just cattiness disgused as criticism to help you "improve") on every little thing that they do and it's just so frustrating.

A lot of people work with an agenda. I don't. I may talk about work an awful lot, but I certainly don't spend my day plotting and thinking about "why are they ahead of me"? Because seriously--I DON'T CARE. I go there to do work, do a good job, the intermitent "good work!" is great, but I'm not gunning for anyone's job, or to be anyone's boss or anything. It's just not where my energies are. I know that I'm just trying to make the most of the time I have on the planet. But other people want to spend their time trying to figure out how to bring you down and then I have to waste my energy, my time, my thoughts, my everything, to deal with this. Then I get stressed. And then I get upset that I'm stressed. And then, all anyone sees is not my strength, not my "I can do this" attitude, they see my tears, my frustration, my mini-breakdown, cause man, everyone has their breaking points and sometimes I'm just not up to hanlde the stress, because there is such a thing as too much.

My boss says that stress is a choice. I believe her--but it's also hard to escape your conditioning. I used to not pay too much credence to "feedback". Then I was told I needed to care more about what other people had to say, listen, not ignore it and use it. So I did that. Now, I'm back to the "filter" stage. But if I'm filtering I've still got to listen to that crap! And I'm telling you, when it's time for you six-month scan or your friends have been sick or whatever, listening to the petty, small things makes me want to lose it. Which I guess is just one more thing I've got to work on.