About playing nice

It's like eating sticky, smelly, fly-enticing, hardened potato salad that sat atop a picnic table for hours in the summer sun but you have to just eat it and smile all-yum-this-is-delicious. Working with people you don't mesh well with, I mean.

I haven’t figured out how grownups are supposed to handle this exactly. I remind myself to be a Christian and practice my patience and kindness (especially on the days when his/her voice is like the sound of loogie spitting, nails on a chalkboard and puking all rolled into one).

Usually this works, but sometimes, my ability to be a cool breeze wears thin and, well, it turns an average day into a cruddy one. Any advice?

When I jumped from PR into corporate marketing, I landed in an office for fifty plus hours per week with a few folks who seemed like regular, nice people but then, whamo!

I witnessed things that made me squish up my nose, nod my head like tisk tisk and whisper “shame on you.” Yikes! Really now. There are some phony, sneaky, lying finger pointers out there.

“You’re not so nice on the inside, not so nice at all!” I wanted to shout aloud, not that that would shake them into realization so we could all sit around singing kumbaya but it was disappointing! Not to be Eeyore but I did lose a little faith in my fellow man. My sister says this is because I was crazy enough to take “one of those office jobs.” She can’t see how anyone can be happy under fluorescent lights in a cubicle.

So I’d pay attention to these particular colleagues to see if maybe they weren’t really bad on the inside. Perhaps it was just a terrible day, week, month or year or something. Often, I’d go all psychoanalytical and wonder if maybe they were ultra insecure and that made them do not-nice things to feel more confident. Sometimes that was the case, I think.

In a few instances, however, they were ickier than I could imagine. Puke-a-rama. Seriously.

Play nice, Jody. Play nice.

When I was a kid, playing nice was easy.

I countered the mean words of a punky kid a few times but I was a quiet, little miss do righter so I just avoided the bad kids without much effort.

Not-nice people don’t fit in your circle either, I bet.

It was simpler back then. If you didn’t click with someone, you just didn’t hang with him/her. If you thought someone was a bad person, same thing. Piece of cake! Group projects that merged you with these people were temporary and manageable. You could always just roll your eyes when they weren’t looking and call them stupid heads in your diary. Confession: I still do this and, yes, it does help. :)