Architects Anonymous

You know in those movies where the geeky main character is put in a location where they don't fit in but through sheer hard work and determination they manage to gain the respect of all their peers and the admiration of their boss but then they realise that this is not the life for them so they sacrifice everything in a heartbeat and quit (wait, isn't that "The Devil Wears Prada")? Er yeah, that NEVER happens in real life.

My boss is a temperamental guy - I really respect and like him but it's often hard for me to judge how he feels about me. Sometimes he'll pat me on the shoulder and tell me what a good job I'm doing and then often, I'll say hi to him in the morning and he'll completely ignore me. A big fat rejection. Silence. Nothing.

The past few days he has been especially cold. I'm not sure what I've done - it could be the new glasses I'm sporting, or perhaps he overheard something I had said. Anyway, he's been giving me the cold shoulder treatment. So I tried to be all friendly and conversational but I think I somehow managed to make it even worse. Then at lunch time, my friend and I were talking in the canteen and basically were about 10 minutes late getting back to work. My boss SUBTLEY goes into the canteen and asks my friend whether she can order lunch for a client and then without saying a word to me, manages to communicate the fact that he thinks I should be back at my desk. How he did that, i still don't know but maybe that's why he's the boss and I'm not.

This annoyed me a bit. On my floor I'm always the first into work and I work hard and often leave late. Plus, I don't even take that 5 minutes rest after an hour's work that Human Resources are always harping on about and now he makes me feel worthless just because I'm 10 minutes late from lunch? My friend immediately left to get lunch while I cleaned up my plate. My boss then walks into the canteen again, possibly to make a coffee but most likely to check why I hadn't made it back to my desk yet. He stood next to me with his mug but I refused to make any social plesantaries. After a few awkard huffs and sighs (possibly in a lame attempt to cut the tension) he hurried back to his desk.

I really thought that I had exacebated the situation but actually when the time came for us to go home, out of the blue, he cheerfully said goodbye to me. Perhaps it human nature to be hurtful to the ones that are kind to us and kind to the ones who are hurtful towards us?

I'm not JD from Scrubs (although ironically I am narrating my own life at the moment). I don't need a mentor and I don't constantly seek the approval of my boss but I would like to know that my boss atleast doesn't hate me or think I'm lazy. Actually in hindsight, perhaps the reason he said goodbye to me was because I was staying late (unnecessarily I'd like to add) to finish some work. I actually told my friend (yes, THAT one) to not talk to me because i wanted to finish my work and I made sure my boss could hear me. Coming to think of it, after my boss had left, he came back again after about 2 minutes to "collect something" but I bet it was just to check whether I was still there. I bet he thought that i was only staying to impress him (which I was) and that i would leave as soon as he had gone (which I did).

Ok, so maybe the Ugly Betty/Devil Wears Prada model does occur in some work places but very rarely. We live in a different age now. The only way to get a boost up is to tread on the person below. Modern offices aren't about working hard at all - it's about running the gauntlet of office politics.

I often wonder who reads my blogs. Apart from my blog buddies, I'm not sure who else would be interested - yet every day the counter goes up. I wonder if any of the people I've written about have ever read this blog or if any of my long abandonned friends from school have by chance ever stumbled upon this digital journal which paradoxically both conceals my identity yet reveals my every thought (therefore revealing my identity?).

Perhaps these people have read my blog but were too afraid to comment - it is easier to pretend not to know than to deal with the potential fallout. For me, writing these exposes almost feels like purposely playing Russian Roulette with 5 bullets in the barrel - I want these people to know how I feel, I want to be found out.

I only mention this because the day after I wrote about my friend at work, she suddenly stopped all contact. No emails, no randomly hanging around my desk, nothing. Perhaps she had read the blog. Or perhaps one her friends had read it and then told her about it. In any case, I saw her today and out of the blue she told me she is going out on a date tonight with some guy from the office. I'm so tired from work to even begin to analyse whether she is doing this in a lame attempt to garner some attention from me or whether she never liked me in the first place. In any case, I'm happy, I have finally got her off my back - yet in a weak moment of selfishness after she told me, I couldn't help but feel a short sharp pang of disappointment. It's always nice to feel wanted despite the fact you know you could never really reciprocate those feelings. In any case, I hope it works out for her - not least because i can actually have a drink with my friends on a Friday night without having to entertain her all night.

It seems incredulous to believe that out of millions of blogs, your friends would accidently stumble onto your one but I suppose stranger things have happened - the largest thing a blue whale can swallow is a grapefruit, the smallest egg laid by any bird relative to its size is an ostrich egg, the largest living thing on earth is a type of fungus. Who knows? Perhaps one day I'll stumble on to an angry blog written about me. Here's hoping.

I've been feeling rather lucky these past few months. My job has been going well, people like me (?!) and things have generally been going well. During this time however, at the back of mind was always a feeling that this luck wouldn't last forever. Ever since I started working, I've been waiting for the moment my life would come crashing back down again and go back to my normal tragic life.

Well, today was the day my luck officially began to run out. I got a email from my cousin today regarding her youngest son. Now, it is no secret within our family that we all think that her children are the devil's spawn. They are rude, insolent and spoiled and to top it off, their mother is blind to it all. Anyway, in the email, she tells me that her youngest son has "changed" - he doesn't go to school, he doesn't come home and he's hanging out with gang members (we actually all thought he did all these things anyway). And to fix this problem (which, let's face it, was inevitable) she is going to force her son to study in England in an attempt to remove him from the bad company he keeps.

A noble effort, I thought, but how does this concern me? - I was about to be shocked.

She intends for my family, i.e. my dad, my brother and I to look after her son for her when he is in England! Yes! The devil's spawn, living with us! Has she no SHAME? Let's PRETEND, in some odd parallel universe that we didn't mind, human decency dictates that she shouldn't even consider asking us to do this in the first place! She wants us to help her look for school for him and Oh! By the way, these schools shouldn't have entrance tests or interviews because she doesn't want him to know! WTF??! Isn't he going to suspect something when you start buying uniform for him? And let's face it, if he doesn't listen to her, what chance is there of him listening to us?! Slim to none! She is retarded if she thinks that by moving him to a new country, he will become a new person. She is not fixing the problem, only relocating it. There are bad people in EVERY country. It takes will power and self control to stay on the straight and narrow, not a holiday in the sun (well, actually it's raining right now in England but...).

And then there's my friend from uni who now works where I work. She is really beginning to annoy me. First of all, it's pretty obvious to everyone, including me that she has a HUGE crush on me. In fact she even admitted it but then when i turned her down, she proceeded to tell me she was "drunk and only joking". Listen honey, this is the 21st century - we all know what "I was drunk and only joking" really means. Anyway, now she's following me around like a dog that needs to be walked. She works where I work, she lives where I wanted to live and every lunch time, she hangs around my desk and wants me to go to lunch with her. Then at the end of the day, she hangs around my desk so that we can take the tube together. Weirdo! And the worse thing is, you know when someones turns u down for lunch or whatever it is, u make ur excuses and leave, right? What does Miss weirdo do? She stands there until the silence between us becomes unbearable and THEN she leaves - what a freak.

All in all a pretty crap day, i think you would agree. Well, atleast I can stop worrying about when my good luck streak will come to an end - because it already has.

After years of deliberate alienation and pushing everyone away, I've finally reached a point where I have no friends left now. No one to wish me Happy birthday, Merry Xmas or Happy new year, no one to phone me up on the cuff and say "Hey, guess what..." I haven't had to answer my mobile phone at all in the past 5 months. According to reseachers, in life we apparently only manage to accumulate 5 true friends... someone better tell them I'm still waiting for my 5...oh and some large fries.

It's not that I inherently dislike the concept of friendship but it's just that sometimes friendship becomes too much like hard work. Having to go out to places that you don't want or talk about things you have no interest in just to sustain a relationship. Plus then there's the incessent door knocking and mobile ringing to see what you're doing when actually, all you want is a quiet night in.

It's also probably somewhat psychological too. When I was 19, my mum died of cancer and all my friends decided to abandon me. So somewhere in my messed up psyche is a little demon telling me that all friends are traitors. Having said that, from experience, I've always found that whenever I've needed anything from any of my friends, they have always let me down (whereas I would, without fail do/get anything they needed me to). Certainly, none of them were there "when the rain starts to pour".

Then there's all the gossip and back-stabbing. If someone talks badly about my friends, I defend them to the bitter end but I'm certain that none of my friends would do that for me. They've all bitched and had a good laugh about me at some point. I'm often told that I shouldn't judge people by my own standards but why shouldn't I? I certainly do not compromise my standards when it comes to everything else so why should I judge people by any other standards?

And finally there's the stupid, pointless, endless questions about relationships. "Oh he's so good to me, but he doesn't excite me, should I sleep with my ex? Will that fix things?", "Oh, why doesn't she like me, I've stalked her non stop but she still doesn't like me, Why, Andy, WHY??". I wouldn't mind if they only asked me these questions once and then actually thought about my advice and used it, but no, it's the same question every few days in a slightly different format.

All of which makes me realise that actually I'm glad I have no true friends at this juncture. And it seems that I am no the only one - apparently 25% of Americans don't have a single friend. Sure sometimes it stings when it's the weekend and noone asks you to do things but actually the pros outweigh the cons. Well for me anyway.

In many cases, people don't have to alienate or push people away to have no friends...they just simply don't have any. Maybe they are weird or ugly or socially awkward and just can't make any friends. I hate it when people say smuggly "To make friends, all you have to do is be yourself!". But it is exactly BECAUSE they are themselves (weird, ugly, socially awkward) that they have no friends - the advice is logically self defeating. I know I am certainly not myself when I meet new people otherwise I'd be selfish and self-centred - not exactly attractive. How many times have we noticed that our friends aren't how they were when we first met them.

When all is said and done, making friends and sustaining friendships is a game. It may be painfully tiring or incredibly exhilarating but ultimately, like any game, you stand to either win the lot or lose it all . And if you don't want to play the game, then get off the court.

I only ever seem to write blogs when I'm depressed - perhaps there's some modern day Einsteinian theory for that. Anyway, since I haven't written for (x amount of) months, let's do a quick review in less than 1000 words.

So I got a job. Having a great time despite having to semi-betray one of my colleagues within the first few months. It's a long story but basically, she has been in the company a year longer than I have, but due to, let's say "complications", she and my boss fell out. When the time came for someone to run a new small project, my boss decided to choose me rather than her, even though she has alot more experience. I toyed with the idea of asking my boss to give the project to her - after all, it rightly belongs to her. On the other hand, if I just handed her the project, I'd be wasting an opportunity that every architect prays for. In the end, I just kept my head down and got on with my work. This led to some awkward silences, to the point where she had to move teams. I'm not sure if she blames me or not but I don't really talk to her anymore or perhaps I should say, she doesn't talk to me anymore. It's a shame since she was the first person I became friends with when I arrived at the office.

Anyway, that pretty much catches us up again - Oh I missed out the part where I intentionally boycotted the office Xmas party but that's not really that interesting (*scoff* like ANY of this interesting...)

Anyway, I'm pretty fed up of people (especially my dad) accusing me of not knowing the value of a pound just because I never had to work during my childhood or my teenage years. Ok, so I never had pocket money either because my parents would buy me whatever I wanted but that didn't mean that I would just think - "Ooh shopping spree" everyday. If anything it made me even MORE wary about money because I felt guilty about spending it. My parents had enough money to send my brother and I to private school, but I don't think we could ever be considered as rich. My dad would often come home telling us just how much debt we were in (great parenting skills) and just how little money we had. If my parents became even poorer because of my spending habits, it meant that the whole family was financially screwed. Can you even imagine the amount of pressure that has on a child? As a result, I have always been very careful with any money that is given to me, to the point where my friends think that I'm "tighter than a duck's arse" (their words, not mine)

When I got my new job, instead of blowing my month's wages on drinking and fancy Italian restaurants, I'd try to limit my spending. Don't get me wrong, I still buy expensive (and sometimes pointless) things, but I make sure that there is enough in the bank. Anyway, after 3 months of working, I have managed to save quite abit. I was hoping to buy myself a new laptop and some clothes this month when out of the blue, my dad came up to me this morning and asked me to borrow some money. Now usually, I'd be ok with this, because this man has put me through private school for 12 years and has provided me with everything that I have ever wanted but this time I was a bit annoyed.

In the past few years, my dad has borrowed alot from me and my brother. He has borrowed atleast £90,000 (yes, 90) from our mother's inheritance to save his failing business, which he intends to pay back - how he is going to do that is another question. In an effort to pay back his escalating debts and taxes etc, he also got me to buy the house that we are already living in with my inheritance money (so that he gets the money to pay his debts). So now I own a house that I don't want, AND I'm paying for a mortgage on a house that I don't want and I almost have no inheritance money left.

This would all be fine, but then this morning, he asked to borrow another £7000, I only have £8000 in the bank so he is pretty much taking almost all of it. He says he will pay it back, but I know he never will because basically, he is unable to. I'm not sure what I can do - I only hope that he doesn't take any of my brother's inheritance. His only justification is that when he dies, my brother and I will stand to inherit alot from him. Growing up, that was his justification for everything. If he missed our parents evening or school play, he would tell us, "you 2 stand to inherit so much when I die". I guess it made him feel better for never being there when we needed him.

As a father, my dad is a pretty bad parent. He never looked after us when we were growing up, he cheated on my mum when she was alive, he's married another woman within a year of my mother dying and hasn't told my brother and I about it (whoops!) and he refuses to see that his business is pretty much dead - but despite all this, I can't stand around and watch him fail. I'm not heroic and I'm not selfless, I just can't help myself.

It's even more absurb when I force myself to type it out: a 24 year old just out of university having to use everything he has earned to pay the escalating debts of a 52 year old man who runs 3 businesses. When my dad lets me down and justifies himself by saying I stand to inherit alot of money from him, I always tell him the same thing: that money is not important to me. And he will always say "that's because you don't know the value of a pound". But it is exactly BECAUSE I know the value of a pound that I realise that money is not valuable. Money is not as valuable as going to your child's school play, or spending time with your family, or realising the consequences when you cheat. Certainly, money can't buy your own son's love nor his respect.