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smart_idiot2010
Hummingbird
Hummingbird

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Joined: 4 Jan 2010
Age: 37
Gender: Female
Posts: 20
Location: lalaland

13 Sep 2011, 2:47 am

So maybe this is just a complaint, and not really a discussion, but I thought I had made a friend at work. My coworkers have always for the most part been professional but studiously avoided personal relationships with me. This is the first place where I work closely with middle-aged settled people, and I was thinking maybe I just needed more mature coworkers to talk with. She talks to me and the conversation seems to me to go back and forth pretty well. She says hi when i leave/come in and sometimes to ask how it's going, etc. I know she spends the weekends with coworkers but not me, but I am newer and she didn't like hide it from me so I was OK with it.

Well, last week she told me her son has Asperger's. Sigh. I just remind her of her Aspergers kid. What I really have is a coworker who instinctively knows how to "deal" with me without realizing why. Rather than being warded away my me being a bit "off," she is reminded of stories about her son she feels compelled to share with the nearest person. Yup-- everything my "friend" has told me voluntarily has been a story about her son.

I was sitting alone in the break room the other day when i realized we had been eating lunch at the same time the past couple months (she has eaten at that time for years), but she had seemed to have been skipping it the past couple weeks. The next day I was going to comment about her working too hard, when i noticed her taking her stuff off and washing her hands to go eat--somewhere else. And tonight she asked me when i was going to eat, then went really early. I feel bad now she is making an effort to avoid me (I know how not fun that can be); she's so nice I wish she would've just told me not to bother her and I wouldn't.

She has an ebook she says she reads instead of watching tv. I would turn on the tv and leave her alone but we always ended up talking. I think now maybe she just meant to make a few nice comments then read at lunch, but I just kept talking and she was too nice to tell me to stop. I thought sitting with me meant she liked talking, but I think maybe she was being nice and not doing the typical sit all the way across an empty room from me thing most people do. It's so sad I can't get my signals right because what I'm basing them off of isn't ever normal either. I'm hoping she'll go back to her routine and I can vary my times so I'm with her maybe a lunch or two a week since I suppose every one was a bit much.