Are you different? Do you have trouble at work?

I'm just curious about other people's stories. I am working for myself now - at 61 - and 30 years in the mortgage industry. I always had such a terrible time trying to work in business and it was simply because I was too different.

I was a democrat for one thing. And I actually dared to have ideas and opinions. That never went over very well even though I was always polite and tried to do the best job I could.

But I found it impossible to change who I was.

Never seemed to matter. Management was always looking for puppets and god knows there are plenty of them out there.

that don't pertain to the work environment...and in that case, i keep them to myself. there is no reason for my coworkers or clients to know a thing about me that doesn't involve the work i do. if a coworker becomes a friend...then yeah...rock on with the opinions...but never a client.

sP

not likely to conform (meaning you surrender your individuality), you are flagged if you work in an environment where obedience to a standard is demanded. Even being more intelligent than your coworkers and god forbid, your employer, puts a target on your back.

Seems like at most places I've worked, it was pretty much all about teamwork, to the nth degree. Meaning if you worked faster, harder, or frankly, just had better ideas or were a bit brighter than others on your team, you were a target. I'm remaining as an independent contractor as long as I can.

year's ago. I just kept thinking there was something wrong with me.

Probably, if you start to feel that way it means you need to literally run for your life.

subservience to be successful and play the game. I know exactly what you mean. If the rewards are great enough in terms of pay, the work is honest, and you can go along with it... I always checked my views at the door before going into work. If it all was really unacceptable I went on to another company.

Do you think?

I am so honest its pathetic. Mortgages and banks really aren't the place for honest people. They need people who are game players and who don't have a problem working in the gray area.

I hated the stuff that was going on. And when I hate something I am not good at keeping my mouth shut. I'm never rude. I just keep pointing it out.

I think I was just really irritating.

mortgage. I told them so. It wasn't part of my job as their attorney, but I felt ethically compelled to point out they could not afford to buy a house that failed 90% of the home inspections and restore it to habitability. They bought it anyway.

You have my sympathies.

Hey, if this couple go Chapt 13, at least they can't say you didn't warn them.

Having integrity sucks sometimes.

You did the right thing. But if you work for a mortgage banker and all the loan officers make their living off commission you can't tell a customer they can't afford the house.

My own strategy was to go into nursing and work 12 hour night shifts when bosses weren't around. Night shifts attract all the square pegs, so I fit right in. Besides, you have to be a little nuts to go into something like nursing that demands a high level of skill and returns a relatively low level of pay. I also got to do it in comfortable shoes.

Business drones never seem to realize all the ideas they're stealing and passing off as their own come from the square pegs.

Unfortunately there never is a night shift in the banking and mortgage industry. I would have been so much better off.

Someone said that in business its not enough for someone else to win - they have to destroy the opposition as well. That seems so true to me.

$100,000 per year.

You just cannot put a price tag on the service you provide.

Nurses are the BEST.

divestment. Fortunately, IBM understood that what I did on my own time was my business and not theirs.

I have had success in my 30+ year career by keeping my non-business-related opinions to myself. I've been fortunate to work in a *helping* field has provided an outlet for my altruistic nature. Although the right-wing mindset is everywhere, it's how you choose to respond to it that makes the difference between personal serenity or frustration.

I hted it, I think people are dumb (and am proven right more often that not)and am a free thinker and sayer. So I don't get along with most people.

I am okay within my little community but when it comes to work I see so many things that should be better...

I haven't really had much in the way of jobs in my life. Motly I ahve my own business or was a supervisor or manager, where I was the boss, so all that didn't really matter.

but when I was an employee, I was an awful one.

Business doesn't really want really smart, think for themselves kinds. Too hard to control.

Management was always looking for puppets. Never a shortage of them. We called them suckasses where I worked.

Don

On one occasion, my boss was also different. She and I got along quite well. We didn't say anything about the other people who worked there, but it was understood that we were cut from a different cloth. That did not make us better, just different. Things started to get rough for her. She had an understanding husband, and she went back to school.

I had another job where the boss understood me and liked my creativity. I had to leave because my husband died and I relocated.

Those were the only jobs where I did not have a terrible time.

You have to decide whether it is worth the hassle. HR might work with you. If you have to be employed and can't change, maybe you can find a job where you don't interact with too many people, or you do what Warpy recommends. It sounds like a good thing that you are working for yourself.

Right now I am not employed. But that may have to change. I will consider carefully if that does happen.

Employers can demand anything and get it just because jobs are so hard to find. Especially for aging boomers. I have a friend that has been out of work for almost a year and has not gotten one interview. It is terrible out there right now.

It's a small company and I couldn't ask for a better boss (boss is also the company owner).

As soon as folk find out that I am a Liberal,Free Thinking Deadhead, (And being a Deadhead Here in S.E.Kansas is an adventure in itself,Think FReeper,Redneck,Ignorant of the Issues Hell) It is even harder when one does not conform to the regional norms around here...

I do not like the Kansas State Wildcats...I'm a Jayhawker (K.U)

I have no need for a Ford F-350 with a "Powerstroke" (This one get lots of giggles around my house)

I Don't Believe in having twenty firearms...I simply have no need for one.

I smoke my Tobacco,not chew it.

Ok,Ok,all kidding aside the last time I held a real "Job" Here I delivered Auto Glass and Exhaust Parts From Wichita thru Kingman,Pratt,Greensburg,Dodge City,Garden City,Protection,Medicine Lodge,Anthony,Harper...You get the point.
I was ethier loading or driving/delivering stuff 13 hours a day...At Nite! 600-725 miles a nite 5 nites a week as well as one or two days,yes DAYS a week in the Warehouse.

This came out to appox 80-84 hours a week

My "Productivity" was fantastic...My attitude was atrocious,My ability to safely operate my Truck was horribly comprised by fatigue,overwork and lack of sleep and my Employers "Tude was "Tough Shit,Now Drive the Damn Truck"

Did I mention the truck had 673,000 miles on the OD? Badly Mantained Miles? I had a front wheel bearing go bad at 70mph,I got the truck stopped and found the Wheel Assembly...In a farm field a coupla hundred yards away.

I Hate Republican Values.

my last interview before my present job, I was asked if I was a team player and I knew the drill, "...oh, yes, I am..."

well, right there in the middle of the interview it hit me... I am not a team player and I never will be, so I said, "...I used to think I was but now I know I am not..."

for this very reason.

Everywhere I worked, I ended up with a reputation as a bitch on wheels. I'm smart and have a bachelor's degree, but am also convicted felon, so I was relegated to the clerical pink collar dungeon, where I found most of my coworkers to be unbearably stupid and duller than dog-snot. I'm single and don't have kids and I wasn't socially smart enough to pretend to be interested in the Johnny did this, Janey did that stories.

It's quite comical because (well, I can laugh a little about it now) I look like a little white kewpie doll. Short, blond woman with a round face. For most of my youth, I looked like a doll. And now I sort of still do and perhaps remind people of their favorite aunt. Which, to a few, I am.

LOL.

On a personality level, I am very independent, strong-willed, and strongly opinionated. I am not obnoxious, but I don't back down either. ;-)

Some really can't handle the incongruity between my appearance and my personality.

I've worked in corporate America for over 20 years. I've found it difficult to play the game of schmoozing the boss. It just seemed to unseemly to me. Some bosses I hated. Some I genuinely liked and got on well with. But I was never very good at negotiating the chain of command and wound up ruffling someone's feathers (usually without meaning to and being unaware of it). Though I always got on well with customers and peers.

So, at 48 in July, I am thinking of going into business for myself. I really want the freedom to be myself at work and put my heart and passion into something I can be proud of. Something I can build on. And I hope I'll finally have a boss who treats me like a grown up.

:-)

...acting with compassion was a sure-fire way to get axed.

It never stopped him. Especially after he started his own business.

to be learned here.

If you don't "fit in" for whatever reason, especially in business, maybe your own business is the thing to do.

The helping professions are a little more forgiving of "different" personalities, IMO.

I worked as an admin-plus to a director in adult services at United Cerebral Palsy, and wrote grants for the Exec Director and consultants, for 3 years to the day. I liked--and got along with--the clients much better than I did my co-workers, except for the cleaning crew.

I once told my mom that I had taken the low-paying UCP job so that I could use my many skills to assist those less fortunate, and that the clients were first and foremost for me. My mom said, "You're the only one up there who thinks like that. Everyone else comes to work just to get paid." Of course, she was right. I've found that it's that way in most every industry, too.

I temped for the president/CEO and the CFO of Goodwill Industries for a couple of months and discovered that, in some instances, even non-profits are run for profit. I wasn't even considered for the job because the pres/CEO wanted a spanish-speaking person as his EA so that he could be taught spanish, since he owned a place in Costa Rica and intends to retire there.

When I worked as a supervisor and operations manager in hospital labs at a leading southern university medical center, there was a lot of crazy unprofessionalism among my peers and the employees who worked in my area. What was even more messed up was that they made me supervisor over the woman who was supervisor before they hired me, then told me that I had to work with her; not she had to work with me--I had to work with her. I'm black, she's white, in the deep south. It was a nightmare. I was forced to do an intervention for an employee of 12 years--she too was white--whom I supervised and who I accidentally discovered was actively drinking on the job. At 10:00 AM in the morning--her shift began at 7:00AM--she registered a blood alcohol level of .08. Yet there were physicians and others who hated my guts for intervening. I visited her a couple of times in rehab, but no one else did. Yet, some months later, I was terminated.

Over the years, I also discovered that the less you're paid, the more work employers expect, except in one case at a knowledged-based company called LRN, where they paid you well but worked you like a dog, with a supervisor that screamed at you if you made a mistake after your first day. There was also the temp job at a Los Angeles medical center where I had to file some 3 years worth of HR documents, although they had 7-8 administrative personnel at various levels in the same office who should have done the work. It paid $17.00 per hour, and each of the admin support persons cleared their office of stacks and stacks of filing they'd not done, contemptibly shoveling it to me.

To quote Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman, "I've been around, you know," so I can say with a surety that the work world, whether non-profit or for-profit, whether health care or legal or municipal or whatever, has been a mess for years and years. And years.

full of thumpers and tea-party candidates.(the teabaggers hadn't formed yet).

I never voiced opinions, unless asked. I figured, if you ask, well then you wanted to know, right?

I was also a mechanical engineer, w/o a degree. That pissed off the new manager, but I was the best they had.

He railed on one day about it, and finally I had to point out that his degree was NOT a guarantee of intelligence.

I lasted a few years after that, then it became too costly to keep me employed(I was 57).

And I surveyed the office and wondered who would be left still working out of our group of eight, I came to the conclusion that corp. America does do diversity physically. But they don't do diversity of personalities. Most people who work in an office have similar personalities.

Ugh.

I was right. A year later, the two that remained were totally company creatures.. One was an older momma type, the kind that didn't mind nurturing everybody else in the office. The other was one who was the "office expert," who had positioned himself as the guy who wrote the standards.

Everybody else, the lady who loved plants and took holidays around them, gone. The guy who was into tye dying and SCA gone. The lady who loved her Harley, gone. The older guy who was retired and brought back as a contractor, gone.

When you grow up around a gaggle of siblings, it's easy to feel invisible. When you're not classically attractive, it's easy to feel ugly. When your family fails to be fortified with monetary might, it's easy to feel like a loser. In short, the word for me was weird.
Luckily, I let a notion hit me before I hit 20, just a slight shift in labels and perception...weird became unique. Out of the ordinary. Much easier for me to believe in myself after that.

I haven't tried to be part of the professional world since the end of '96, when I found out my youngest was on the way. Now that she's old enough, there's not a lot of demand for my obsolete tangible skills, and no regard for the less tangible ones that used to be so highly thought of.

Man as machine is not merry in the making. I'd say be proud this particular pitfall is not for you, but I suspect that's already the case.

left brained world.

That pretty much is how it is.

While everyone is out partying I'm home sitting Zen.

The hard part is that people like me need to make enough money to survive.

A nemesis that all too often serves to convince me I must have been a puppy obsessed with chasing my tail in a former life. I think my identifiers in this regard are more about the contrast between abstract and concrete. Viability for the average bear is elusive and we require much more than pic-a-nic baskets. I wish I could tell you I'm sure it's out there to be had, I'd feel less than honest if I did.

Hound the hunt, though. If anyone has a hope of flushing out a way, it's bound to be a freer thinker like you.

edited for spell check.

different parents with different kids. It works out well for me. I am shunned by the x-tians I work with. They are bat-shit crazy so no love lost there.

I am not just different: I've been much maligned. With some folks in my area, if you aren't x-tian you aren't worth knowing and since they don't bother to get to know me I am treated poorly.

I live in Salt Lake for about 6 years and then moved to the Bible Belt. I know lots and lots of conservative Christians.

I am always very nice to them. Very polite. And I am a whole lot nicer than they are (not all of them. Some are very nice people).

Its very difficult for them to be hateful to someone who treats them so well and who is always friendly and who cares about them and their families.

When I was in the corporate world, I loved my job--but really
detested the politics, the game playing and the psycho bosses.

All of this nonsense was rewarded with raises and promotions. The
better you were at playing the game, the more you excelled. Many
sell their souls, that's for sure. In my opinion, the corporate
world brings out the worst in many people.

It's very easy to become as cynical as Holden Caufield, after
being in the corporate world. Although some are nice, and
recognize the bs, a large swathe of worker bees are fake, backbiting,
petty little ladder climbers who would sell their own mother for
a raise or a promotion.

I've walked away from every job with life-long friends, but also
memories of vacuous jerks as well.

Good times. :(

But being in academia, I don't have trouble as a result of being different, only in being different enough to BE different.

;-)

But I was in Anthropology in the 60's. Women were not welcome there at that time. I think we were all forced out one way or another. Men didn't want women working in the field with them. Believe it or not, they liked to work in their skivvies and couldn't if women were there. How completely dumb is that? Thank God things aren't that bad any more.

One of the most brilliant students there in Physical Anthropology was a lesbian. I worked and studied right beside her for weeks. She was one of the smartest people I have ever known - and one of the nicest. As soon as they figured out she was a lesbian she was out the door. She went on to work in the medical field and did well there.

black and non-stereotypical a la the OP and supernova's descriptives. I have struggled with being "different" my whole work life. Being authentic, smart, well-spoken, well-read, honest, direct, and hard-working has, so far, netted me nothing in the work world, except sudden joblessness, often without notice or any thought that I would be discharged. A handful of the jobs terminated me not long after giving me raises and glowing reviews. I'm single, never married, no children, and independent. My mom says she admires me for never following the crowd, but employers have always had a problem with me, nevermind my competency, commitment to excellence, and work ethic. To date, I've been unemployed since late 2007, have run out of UI and am trying not to become homeless. I had a job interview last week that looks promising, with a possible second interview this week.

It was also my mom who, just before Sept 11, 2001, assured me that there was nothing wrong with me, that employers want sycophants, rather than competency and integrity.

I'm afraid that being a game player is really way more important than intelligence or skill level.

No wonder our corporate world is such a complete mess. So full of greed and incompentence.

Really, after looking back, I just wish I had bailed earlier. But you have to have self cconfidence if you want to strike out on your on and it took me a long time to get that kind of confidence.

I could never get into the drone mindset, but I did survive through my work life through sheer gritting of my teeth. I still am working part time thanks to what the Bush economy did to my nest egg and I'm seventy years old. I guess I'm going to die with my boots on.

about work. I too dared to have ideas and opinions--thought it made me brave, courageous and bold. No, I was just shooting myself in the foot.

Management wants docile little workers who do their job and don't question things.

For most of my life, I've been "socially challenged"--still am, to a degree--and I figured that's why I stuck out.

The way to make it at work is don't rock the boat, go along to get along, do what you're told, keep your mouth shut, wear a mask.

time. Because of that, I was often overlooked for promotions, even tho I had a huge customer following, was a dependable employee and also produced results - by caring about my customers.

Turns out, maybe they should have listened to me..... I spent 25 years at Bank of America.

The happiest day of my life was when I walked out that door because I was NO LONGER being stifled.


Some of us are just too creative to conform.:hug:

I have worked in several - none as big as Bank of America - and it was awful. They wanted cardboard cutouts who sit at their desks and keep their mouths shut. And, And who are wonderfully cheerful at all times.

And some of the biggest assholes I have ever met were the ones who ran the banks. Sociopath egomaniacs in suits with shirts that are dipped in starch.

And mean!