The managers were not saying you need to be best buds with anyone, just that you need to play along with social dynamics sometimes instead of never.

then we have very different ideas of what is tolerable: to me faking interest is already too much.

I don’t mean that all coworkers/extroverted everywhere are like this, because up until I was fired I was unofficially showing the ropes to a younger coworker who, for whatever reason, chose to trust me. I actually enjoyed talking to her because she was also, work oriented and not gossip oriented. She understood that she was there to work and learn.

I’m going to write what goes through my mind when they waste their breath: first I listen to guess if they talk about something I could relate to but most times it doesn’t so if there’s nothing to do (downtime) I disengage and learn, because I want to be better. When they speak about their stuff, they ignore alarms, patients asking for help and other office jobs and why on earth should I cater to patients when they are like that?

They’re better than me and there’s so much stuff I could learn from them, but they prefer to talk about… unrelated stuff. It’s always me the one who has to inquire about procedures or ECG so they explain something. Most of them are passive.

But this is something management won’t see…

I appreciate your post