It's all about image

I've never been inclined to concern myself with appearances. Particularly my own. I suppose when I was young I just didn't think of it; I'd never been taught that looks were more important than character and intelligence, and by the time I encountered that mindset... Well, I was never going to fit in anyway. I accepted my freakdom, eventually with pride, and have always done my best not to judge other people by appearances either.

For the most part, my friends don't seem to either. Very few people I've known at uni have, either, and when I have gone places where appearances are what matter... I've more-or-less been looking appropriate for my identity, as it was constructed at the time.

Which is why it's mildly disconcerting to spend time around people who *do* judge by appearances. I don't necessarily mean that in a harsh way, but...

Okay, I have a new jacket. It's an awesome jacket - waterproof, with a hood that tucks away into the collar and a zip-out liner. It's also bright neon yellow with stripes of reflective silver for night visibility. This jacket is visible from space. It's supposed to be; the idea is that it makes me more visible while I'm riding my motorcycle, day or night, and thus makes it less likely that people will fail to see me and kill me by accident. The guy who sold it to me commented that people would probably see the bright yellow and think I was a cop. I wore it to work today even though I didn't ride to work, because I don't have another raincoat and the weather was vile. Everyone who saw it commented, and most of them made a joke about my becoming a construction worker/joining a road gang.

It's symptomatic of a tendency common among my workmates to judge by image, really a lot. I feel like a judgmental sort of bitch for the fact that I think a lot of my coworkers are shallow, for reading celebrity gossip magazines all the time instead of anything with what I regard as merit, but... it's not just the magazines, it's this whole general trend. I think it's part of what's starting to bug me about working there.

There's this whole dynamic of Appropriate Behaviour or people get hostile - I recently provoked great irritation from one guy by breaching this unwritten code. My breach was in not playing nice enough with something that would, essentially, make the rest of my shift slightly more irksome but grant him something he wanted; the hierarchy factor in his needs, in his view, outweighing mine was this whole complicated thing to do with the night shift being a) cliquey and b) convinced they're superior to the rest of us (some of them consider me to be semi-night shift, and therefore I get semi-included in some of their dynamic, which included one of the nicer ones venting her annoyance to me about some of the day-shift people who were on a little later than usual who were sitting in the night shifts' regular seats.

We have hot seating, which means you pick a free chair and sit in it; people who work the quieter periods tend to have preferences for where they want to sit, and dislike sitting anywhere else, ever. I have my own preferences for where to sit, it's true, but I don't get shirty about other people sitting there if they've claimed it before I show up. My favourite seat is also uncontested with the night shift. The guy who got annoyed with me was wanting a seat not his usual seat for frivolous purposes; my contention was that:

a) I was sitting there first
b) It was my preferred seat
c) That seat did not serve his claimed goal at all, so wtf
d) I was in a bad mood and did not feal like giving up my seat of preference

Yes, adults in a professional environment do have interpersonal issues over crap this trivial.

But that's rather the point; it's all so irksomely banal, and so much of it is wasted time and effort. There are expectations on who you greet, how much of a conversation you will have with them (or non-conversation, really, since giving a sincere answer to the formulaic questions like "how are you" is even more discouraged than in usual society, so much so that people will often skip actually answering the question at all, even in a token answer), and I spend most of my breaks exchanging these phrases with people because social interaction in the workplace takes up all your free time for no meaning. Again, it's all style, no substance. Just occasionally I'd like to skip spending thirty seconds on "Hi, how's it going?" "Not bad, yourself?" "Yeah, pretty good. Looking forward to the weekend." "Yeah, me too." "Isn't it cold today?" "Freezing, the air con is really messed up." and/or formulaic complaints about customers. If you try to introduce an actual topic to a conversation, people always react with surprise before they drag up a response.

Anyway, before I got on to my frustration with office socialisation, I was going to get into the various confrontations one has with image when one is a woman on a motorcycle, but it's past midnight and I need sleep. This is the problem with composing straight into Blogger...