Oversharing is Not Caring

While we were deciding on how to keep the blog afloat during our vacation, we spent quite a bit of time hemming and hawing over posts to write for the posts scheduled while we were gone, including those leading up to the big day. Since we have SO MANY dedicated readers, we knew we couldn’t let you wonder what happened to us while we enjoyed overpriced tropical drinks and salsa dancing! (Or whatever it is we’re actually going to do on vacation). We eventually elected to write a post about Facebook, its uses and misuses, a subject that weighs on us almost daily. Unfortunately, that post has been preempted by this one, a musing on the latest addition to our office and the problems coming along with... her.

The Troubled Temp.

We’ve discovered that real world temps have little in common with Ryan.

As Anya put it: We should write this one about oversharing now, since I have a white hot burning rage toward this day and the Troubled Temp, and it is leaving me a hollow shell ready to collapse in on itself and I’m not sure how long the vengeful creativity energy from that can last until I’m left with nothing but an ulcer.

As you may have guessed from her title and description, Spent Supervisor is rather averse to anything that requires actual work for her (unless it also serves the purpose of making life harder for one of her office enemies).  Our company has a rather lengthy hiring process, which she loathes, and to put off actually dealing with current gaps in the office, she convinced our HR department to contract a couple of temps for the next month.  This allows Spent Supervisor to feel like she’s doing something to solve our current office issues, while not actually doing any additional work, while making our jobs exponentially more difficult for... a couple of reasons.

We were both ready to basically ignore these temps, and put as little effort as possible into actually training them since they can’t fulfill all of our real job functions AND they’re only going to be here for a month. Not. Worth. Our. Time. What we were NOT prepared for was basically being forced to play host to someone who, not unlike a mosquito, just sits around whining in our ears literally non-stop all day and sucking the blood (energy) out of us. Another thing she has in common with mosquitos? Anya wants to slap the shit out of her everytime she sees her. (Luckily for her, I won’t. Maybe.)

Another person who brings about intense slapping urges.

Troubled Temp, like a disturbingly high number of people in this world, labors under the impression that people would really love to hear about every single aspect of her life in great detail. From accent confusion to baby daddies, cause of death to divorce, we have a veritable alphabet of anecdotes from the Troubled Temp, none of it solicited. For seven hours of the day, three days a week, we endure a ceaseless and unrelenting stream of bullshit about Troubled Temp’s family issues, feelings about her life/job/the weather, questions about what we’re typing/who that phone call was from/is that Facebook on your phone.

Anya’s mother makes a habit of complaining about technology today, and how it is leading to the downfall of civilized society. As much as we hate to admit it, she has a point here. We all know people who are hell bent on sharing too much information with too many people, far too often. We shit you not, Anya has a Facebook friend who uploaded a picture of herself at the grocery store captioned “waiting for prescriptions at the pharmacy, ugh!”. REALLY!? At that point, you might as well be posting all of your medical information and heavily filters pics of the prescription bottles on your goddamn Instagram.

WHAT’S YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER, WHILE WE’RE AT IT?!

Lock it up!

We’re not saying we should all be ascribing to Victorian ideals of etiquette, but we cannot be alone here when we implore everyone to draw a few fucking lines of propriety.  We obviously share essentially everything with each other, but that is due to our numerous years of platonic life partnership.  We would never repeat some of the things that come up in our very private kikis to our co-workers, dental hygienists, or fellow members of our online apiary forum.  You should only be sharing certain things with certain people, although it’s not exactly a top-down hierarchy.

To illustrate our point, let’s use your father and one of your friends (this is just a regular friend, between “close friend” and “frenemy” on the friendship scale).  These are both people who are important to you, who you (probably) trust, but the things you share with each of them should be totally different.  You are not going to tell the same embarrassing sexual situation story to your father that you laughed about with your friend.  However, that same friend is not privy to the state of your student loan payments or what’s going on with that weird mole on your shoulder, like your father is.

People you should only be sharing basic standard pleasantries with?  Strangers you meet in a professional setting.  We understand that, in general, we have high standards and expectations, and that there are many different (wrong) ways to go about life.  We’re sure that Troubled Temp thinks that she is a friendly bubble of openness and honesty, but everything she does comes off as nosy, invasive, and far too frank for our taste.  To make everything worse, she’s also pretty damn terrible at the actual work portion of her job.  Really looking forward to the next four weeks.

“Oh, the humanity.”

[Office tattoo illustration by Andrew Joyner]