If you’ve had the enormous pleasure of listening me talk about my job, you may have noticed that our cast of characters is particularly um…special. Seriously. And as I listened to three of them talk today about how much they hate our residents, I decided the absurdity of it all was worth a few paragraphs of story-time, even if mere words are not enough to capture it. So today, we’re going to talk about relationships.
Zenzal, the oldest employee on staff, likes to say that everything in life is about relationships. Relationship-building is her job essentially, and she let’s everyone know about it. And yet, I feel like the relationships we have built with each other and with our residents are so complicated and love-hate.
To start with, we have more cliques than your average middle school, and we’ve only got 21 employees. Everyone belongs to multiple cliques, and sometimes you don’t even know which ones you’re in and which ones you aren’t. For example, Jessie and I are the young-people clique. We do stuff outside of the office together, vent about our co-workers, and always check in after a weekend to see how each other is doing. And we tell secrets. But I’m also a part of the admin clique. Not because I’m supposed to be a part of the admin operations, but because I always end up taking part whether I want to or not. Also the IT clique. We’re the group that laughs at the rest of the employees for their complete and utter lack of computer/office machine literacy. There’s only two of us, sadly.
Then there’s the smoker’s club. They all sit in the corner adjacent to my desk and cackle in their raspy voices about how much they hate our residents. This clique is particularly interesting to me, because of their relationship to our residents. Employees typically are one, two, or three degrees of separation from the low-income folks that live on our properties. Property managers and maintenance are the ones that deal with residents directly, all the time. The smoker’s club consists of the employees that are two degrees of separation away. They deal with residents often, maybe even every day, but it’s not their primary job. Three degrees would be me and the rest of us cubical prairie dogs. But the smoker’s club hates our employees with a passion. They get that they’re poor and hurting and they are deeply compassionate and caring for them…in theory. But they sit in their corner of the office and mock them and complain about them. Those who are only one degree away deal with the frustrations more often than the smoker’s club, but they are all just as poor as our residents. We have two black property managers who are raising children and grandchildren on single-parent salaries, two maintenance workers who are Hispanic, working for peanuts, and barely speak English, and one maintenance worker who has to push-start his car and who most would consider to be white trash. But these five employees don’t hate our residents. They might complain here or there, but for the most part they are in the same boat and would do the same thing themselves if the roles were reversed.
Our residents don’t make it easy though; they are racist and mean, and generally very demanding. With 95% of the population at one of our properties being black, they refer to Jessie and Nicola as “that white woman” (yes, they are one and the same, even though one is a 26 year old, 5’10” and 120lb with long blond hair and one is a late 30s, 5’7” and uh, much larger woman with short black hair), and when they’re not berating us for the ‘expensive’ rent and the police presence (they prefer privacy to safety), they also treat us as couple’s counseling. They will come in hollering about how their wife dumped out their Folgers and replaced it with “cheap-ass” Maxwell House and she will respond with a “Why you gotta be tellin’ these white folks about our personal biznis!?”
Our staff is very diverse, and that race issue pops up, even amongst ourselves. The other day Jessie elbowed me in a meeting and showed me what she had written in the margin of her notepad: “We self-segregated!” I looked up, and saw 5 black faces on the side of the table across from me, and then looked up and down my side of the table and saw white after white after white. It certainly wasn’t intentional, but I doubt it was purely coincidence either. Jessie was telling me the other day about Property Manager meetings, and how they’ve gone from productive work events to drinking gossip fests, and how she is the white macadamia chip in their chocolate-chocolate chip cookie. Five black women and Jessie all get together and gab, and make fun of her for not understanding their ‘black’ jokes…yet, they don’t invite Letitia, who is actually black. Because although her skin might be black, Letitia is perhaps whiter than I am (yes, I know that’s hard to imagine).
We’ve got an extreme-faith clique (Oh, you thought they were all extreme? Well consider them extreme and extremer), a Spanish-speaker’s clique, a mother’s clique, an accounting clique (for some reason accounting laughs more than any other department…I think all the numbers made them crazy), and on and on and on. I understand some of it, and past jobs have certainly had that grouping mentality, but I’ve never been in a group that has formed so many smaller groups. Forget an org chart—I want a clique chart. AKA, I’m going to spend the next 45 minutes here at work creating a color-coded Venn Diagram of our cliques. Awesome.
Zenzal, the oldest employee on staff, likes to say that everything in life is about relationships. Relationship-building is her job essentially, and she let’s everyone know about it. And yet, I feel like the relationships we have built with each other and with our residents are so complicated and love-hate.
To start with, we have more cliques than your average middle school, and we’ve only got 21 employees. Everyone belongs to multiple cliques, and sometimes you don’t even know which ones you’re in and which ones you aren’t. For example, Jessie and I are the young-people clique. We do stuff outside of the office together, vent about our co-workers, and always check in after a weekend to see how each other is doing. And we tell secrets. But I’m also a part of the admin clique. Not because I’m supposed to be a part of the admin operations, but because I always end up taking part whether I want to or not. Also the IT clique. We’re the group that laughs at the rest of the employees for their complete and utter lack of computer/office machine literacy. There’s only two of us, sadly.
Then there’s the smoker’s club. They all sit in the corner adjacent to my desk and cackle in their raspy voices about how much they hate our residents. This clique is particularly interesting to me, because of their relationship to our residents. Employees typically are one, two, or three degrees of separation from the low-income folks that live on our properties. Property managers and maintenance are the ones that deal with residents directly, all the time. The smoker’s club consists of the employees that are two degrees of separation away. They deal with residents often, maybe even every day, but it’s not their primary job. Three degrees would be me and the rest of us cubical prairie dogs. But the smoker’s club hates our employees with a passion. They get that they’re poor and hurting and they are deeply compassionate and caring for them…in theory. But they sit in their corner of the office and mock them and complain about them. Those who are only one degree away deal with the frustrations more often than the smoker’s club, but they are all just as poor as our residents. We have two black property managers who are raising children and grandchildren on single-parent salaries, two maintenance workers who are Hispanic, working for peanuts, and barely speak English, and one maintenance worker who has to push-start his car and who most would consider to be white trash. But these five employees don’t hate our residents. They might complain here or there, but for the most part they are in the same boat and would do the same thing themselves if the roles were reversed.
Our residents don’t make it easy though; they are racist and mean, and generally very demanding. With 95% of the population at one of our properties being black, they refer to Jessie and Nicola as “that white woman” (yes, they are one and the same, even though one is a 26 year old, 5’10” and 120lb with long blond hair and one is a late 30s, 5’7” and uh, much larger woman with short black hair), and when they’re not berating us for the ‘expensive’ rent and the police presence (they prefer privacy to safety), they also treat us as couple’s counseling. They will come in hollering about how their wife dumped out their Folgers and replaced it with “cheap-ass” Maxwell House and she will respond with a “Why you gotta be tellin’ these white folks about our personal biznis!?”
Our staff is very diverse, and that race issue pops up, even amongst ourselves. The other day Jessie elbowed me in a meeting and showed me what she had written in the margin of her notepad: “We self-segregated!” I looked up, and saw 5 black faces on the side of the table across from me, and then looked up and down my side of the table and saw white after white after white. It certainly wasn’t intentional, but I doubt it was purely coincidence either. Jessie was telling me the other day about Property Manager meetings, and how they’ve gone from productive work events to drinking gossip fests, and how she is the white macadamia chip in their chocolate-chocolate chip cookie. Five black women and Jessie all get together and gab, and make fun of her for not understanding their ‘black’ jokes…yet, they don’t invite Letitia, who is actually black. Because although her skin might be black, Letitia is perhaps whiter than I am (yes, I know that’s hard to imagine).
We’ve got an extreme-faith clique (Oh, you thought they were all extreme? Well consider them extreme and extremer), a Spanish-speaker’s clique, a mother’s clique, an accounting clique (for some reason accounting laughs more than any other department…I think all the numbers made them crazy), and on and on and on. I understand some of it, and past jobs have certainly had that grouping mentality, but I’ve never been in a group that has formed so many smaller groups. Forget an org chart—I want a clique chart. AKA, I’m going to spend the next 45 minutes here at work creating a color-coded Venn Diagram of our cliques. Awesome.
3 comments:
Wow, that's a lot of cliques for 21 people. You've given me a great idea for my own environ with LOTS more people...and several 'Brads' =)
LOL I could not survive in that world. Craziness! Your diagrams and lists always make me smile. This is a particularly pretty one.
I know I'm particularly tardy in commenting on this one, but my favorite part of all of this is "Brad."
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