People who aren't Newfoundlanders are known as Outsiders here, so the title is a little play on that. I will save my treatise on the ways in which Newfoundlanders alienate Outsiders for another post.
On Friday, I attended a mandatory "Stress Management Session" sponsored by my firm, as an effort on their part to become more in tune with the needs of the administrative staff. I was very surprised by what came out of that day spent away from the firm. Many of the women who work at the firm cited problems with backbiting, cliques, disrespect from upstart lawyers, and general disgruntlement with a management system that continually keeps them in the dark.
I, of course, being ensconced in the library at all times, experienced none of this, but I gather from this rather eye-opening seminar that it is a serious problem for some who work here.
I enjoy a very unique position in this firm, one shared only by the IT guy here. We don't really work for anyone, save for the COO, and while the IT guy probably has more interaction with the COO than I do, it's more on a collaborative basis that he and I work with her. So there's no pressure on my part to meet goals set by another, and absolutely no possibility for failure, because no matter what I do it's something that I've come up with on my own.
The fact that I also don't work with anyone does tend to alienate me a little from the day-to-day interactions of people. I only see their nice, polite sides (for the most part), and I know nothing of their respective relationships with each other. But it means that I can also remain completely neutral in all things, and I think that is to my advantage here. It means that when people come into the library for a book or a glass of water, they often stay a few minutes for a respite or a sounding board, and it's a nice feeling to be able to work in something so publicly acknowledged to be a sanctuary from the rest of the office.
Because of my age and my level of education, I identify more with the younger set of lawyers who work here. Despite the differences in our incomes, we have more or less the same amount of life experience and common points of interest. So most of my casual, non work-related conversations are with them, and we have the more informal, joking relationships. Most of them, however, are men, so, while I get along with boys, there is that certain level of closeness that we have not achieved, and probably never will.
The older lawyers, again, likely due to my age, treat me like a favoured child (like the one who drove me to work this morning in his convertible, whee). Because my only interactions with the senior partners are on very small items, such as finding lost passwords and repairing old books, I have only ever had positive feedback from them. We are, of course, on complete opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, so our relationships will never progress beyond the casual jocularity in which they now exist.
The assistants who work here are all several years older than I am, but we can bond on subjects of domesticity: dogs, gardens, baking . . . you name it. And because we're women, we tend to share the same opinions on many things, so often a conversation with one assistant in the library will turn into a conversation with seven assistants in the library, as they tend to congregate in here in groups when there's fun going on. Of course, despite the fact that I was a paralegal for four and a half years, my areas of expertise (family law, estates, small claims) aren't practiced here, so I'm out of my league when I speak to them on professional matters, and that kind of leaves me out of the loop.
So I'm kind of a blank, in a sense, a tabula rasa upon which those with whom I work can write their own experiences and I can react in kind. It's a very interesting feeling, and, as an anthropologist whose focus is on participant observation, it's a little disconcerting. I can't really participate with any of these people, because there isn't enough common ground. I feel like the anthropologists of old who rarely stepped off their verandas on the edges of the villages, and who could only observe, and therefore only get half the story.
I bet as a researching anthropologist, and not as a working librarian, that further sense of removal from the everyday workings of the library would actually enable me to get closer to those with whom I work. Odd, that.
Posted by Ally at June 17, 2009 01:57 PM