We tend to work in pairs at my company, and I’m paired with H., whose job is basically identical to mine despite a difference in our titles (I have no idea why I’m “senior” to her). You’ve seen me refer to her as my “teammate” here. We don’t work on projects together, but we do commiserate and collude; sometimes we bounce ideas off each other; and when one of us is out of the office, the other holds the fort and deals with emergencies.
Over the years, somehow, despite being kind of an acquired taste, I’ve tended to get along with most of my colleagues, and it’s a source of great pride and delight to me that I’m still friends with, for example, people I worked with in a bookstore, making minimum wage, on the opposite coast, fifteen years ago. Most of my friends are former coworkers, in fact, and it’s one of the reasons I’m a lousy freelancer: I just get lonely. And then I go online. And that’s the end of my workday.
But although I can get along with most people in small-to-moderate doses, it’s not everyone whom I can really adore, you know? So I feel very lucky that my current teammate is the kind of person who posts signs like this when she’s taking a vacation day:
Also, she has snakes. [Heart]