The Spirit and the Letter
Part Three: Culture Shock Troops
The obvious need for the letter is to prevent different presumed spirits of intent from coming into conflict without some means of objective resolution. Communities of all sizes and constitutions develop codified systems of rules to standardize such resolution, often with the expressed intent to avoid conflict in the first place. “The law” exists as the most complete body of such rules used to govern the country’s public interests, and, by and large, this system at least closely approximates the most basic tenets of a publicly shared contract.
Yet, there are those who would defy even the letter, let alone the spirit, of that contract, and do so with a deluded ambition. Last year, when I left my wife and joined another woman, both of whom I worked with, I knew there would at least be tension within our shared workspace. I knew that what I thought I knew would be an understatement. I was right about being wrong.
Note: While it should go without saying, I’ll say it: I won’t presume to think I can speak to my ex-wife’s experience. It is, to a greater rather than a lesser degree, not part of the issue I’m addressing here.
Not long after having followed through on my decision, the atmosphere in the workplace became eerily tense—not straightforwardly tense the way you have expected, though that, too; but there was this compounding political, Machiavellian tension writhing its way between cube walls and conference rooms. Every e-mail sent and word spoken was, quite without my intension, enveloped by an unremarkable but thick bilious air. There was no getting through the day in anything approaching discretion, however surprising it might be that I expected I could.
We—or, more accurately, she—eventually stepped precisely where Management wanted us to, and they leaped from behind the underbrush like hunger-sickened sycophants. As if prepared for such an intuitively unlikely scenario (in its specificity at least), they swiftly enacted a policy whereby:
- Danielle was allowed the option of termination, or a summarily less engaging and less profitable position in the company;
- we were separated by as much of the space of the workspace as was feasible; and
- we were instructed, not to minimize, but to ceaseany interaction
- on the floor of our office building;
- in the common areas outside our company’s leased space within the building;
- in the parking lot; and
- during our lunch time, even if we went somewhere off the premises.
Of course, we found this a perfectly reasonable reaction, so much so that I took it upon myself to thank Management with a thoughtful note.
That I feel it necessary to write this saddens and frustrates me. I’m not so naïve as to think that any corporate entity or its agents, in their capacity as agents, exist to serve any altruistic nor noble ideals. Still, a company and its agents should still pass the ethical mettle they themselves require. [company name] currently fails that test.
Consider: [company name] management expects from its employees a professionalism comprised of discretion and a common respect for truth. Yet policy has been decided after consideration only of unsubstantiated rumors, prior to, and in the face of, their refutation. No validated evidence of any breach of professionalism has come to light, nor will it ever, as there is none. The only fact pertinent to the topic is that the personal relationships between two coworkers and me have changed.
In defense of the policy, I have been told I brought my personal life into work, the implication being that I deserve whatever consequence may come of that. I have done this only to the extent to which anyone else has. It is neither currently uncommon nor proscribed for employees to be seen showing discrete affection toward one another. I have not crossed the bounds of discretion in any way. Before this assertion is countered by one or another reference to nuptial details—”But you’re married, so it’s different.”—consider that it’s not [company name]’s charge, nor, frankly, it’s forté, to mete out moral direction. Note that this largely sidesteps the degree to which some employees bring their personal lives into their workplace, quite vividly so, without apparent retribution. That is, a poster board celebrating victory at a company-sponsored event is taboo and tantamount to sexual indecency; but a rotating list of “Flavors of the Week” meets all standards of decorum. Understand that this is not a condemnation of that person or her list, nor anyone else’s choice of humor or decoration, but rather an example of apparent inconsistency.
So, then, we’re left to conclude that those employees who have proffered and proliferated rumors about my conduct with another coworker have done the work of bringing my personal life into the workplace. Despite assurances that rumormongering is frowned upon, and is an issue shortly to be addressed, it is the rumors that have taken seat and directed policy, not truth. Couldn’t the rumormongering have been managed prior to concession to it?
So, what to do? I don’t know. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little worried about what creative storytelling might next surface, inflaming more paranoia and not a little silliness, and what its affect(s) on my livelihood might be. I can’t simply mind my business and expect nothing to happen—that hasn’t worked so far. Still, I don’t have much choice but to mind my business and entertain a guarded hope for the best. For now, using a restraint it’s now obvious several people lack, I will restrict interaction with Danielle within the doors of the [company name] offices; but outside the doors, there is no precedent, legal or ethical, which should restrict our interaction. I don’t expect that this should be a necessarily long-lived concession—which is stating the obvious, since I don’t think it is necessary at all.
About eight or nine months later, the moratorium was lifted, the terror alert was dropped to amber, and the workplace seemed to have been sanitized of our immoral cooties. We were allowed to sit together in the break room, in plain sight of other people at work. We were even given allowance to be at one another’s desk for absolutely no work-related reason! That is to say, Management probably found someone else’s ass into which to insert their heads, and so eagerly extracted them from their own.
Not everything magically returned to normal. Danielle still works the lobotomy post for a shitty wage. And there will always be a residue of that fetid, stinking tension, leaving the place with as ill a humor as a fat rendering plant.
There didn’t, and doesn’t, seem to be any real cogent thought given the issue and its remedy. Someone said something that someone else thought might open a can of worms, and so that someone else made what should have been a fairly private tension between three people into a masquerade party to which no one was really invited but to which everyone invited herself. The punch was spiked, the cake was stale, and the people in the three-piece costumes figured they might as well act the part. The idea that they were, through egregious pettiness, acting on behalf of the general emotional well-being of the employees, or at the very least for their productivity (you understand that we became such a profoundly distracting topic from their otherwise enriching working experience, right?), is to invoke a spirit which they cared little about in truth, and which wasn’t worth caring about anyway.
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