Comment on is this the right way to establish boundaries with my nosy coworkers at the hospital?
dennis5wheel@programming.dev 4 months agothank you for your detailed answer.
I don’t know if you resent the idea that your reasons have to be socially acceptable to these guys or should have to be massaged to avoid them taking things personally, but ask yourself this: do you want to teach them a lesson and demonstrate your contempt for them, or do you want to just be left alone to work and to continue to work effectively with them? Pragmatism over principle would make sense here.
my reasons have to be acceptable to them, because otherwise, they’ll feel offended. And this is not a group of adults capable of separating work from personal life, they perceive slights very easily and once they feel offended, they lash out and use any pretext to not help with patients and suddenly, I’m the only one catering to patients while they sit and talk.
I just want to work until I find another workplace. I don’t believe it makes sense to work with them long term.
In short, take the easiest route if possible and just eat somewhere else at lunch and redirect the conversation back to work if they keep talking to you during work.
I cannot eat lunch alone because I have to be on call, even when I’m doing my pause. As a matter of fact, I don’t have a pause. At other units, employees take turns to pause and the ones on duty, work, so each of us gets 30 minutes of peace. This doesn’t happen where I work because for whatever reason, manager wants us to eat all together and feels offended if somebody chooses not to eat with them. They feel offended even for this. If I choose eating elsewhere, manager will order me with her fake politeness to eat with them, because I have to be there, should a patient need me.
What about this: I’m there, eating with them. They ask me a privy question and I answer: ‘nice weather today’ or ‘what did you have for breakfast’? completely ignoring the question and trying to redirect.
Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Yeh that definitely sucks they’ve rigged it up in a way that’s unusual for this type of work and also forces you in to this situation. Redirecting is good and probably your best option, canny and sensitive people will notice you doing this and take it for the hint that it is but dense or uncaring people will probably carry on steering things in to places you don’t want to go. If you’re forced to eat with them then yes redirecting the conversation will work up to a point but it is a subtle skill to do so non-obviously. It’s hard to advise specifically what to say like a script, though I would say if you just totally ignore the question altogether and switch topic very bluntly it’s going to come across strange and prompt confusion and questioning. You’ll need to somehow maintain the initial thread of their topic as lip service and then turn off down an unrelated avenue fairly smoothly. It’s what politicians do professionally. Reading the other responses to your post I think they’ve got some really good ideas on how to deal with this if you really get forced in to conversing against your will. It’s a subtle art of contributing basically nothing and rephrasing their same question back to them. I think another commenter suggested something along the lines of “I don’t know much about that what about you?” and similarly bland and useless resonses. This is friendly enough not to piss anyone off and lame enough to be totally uninteresting which hopefully invites little follow up. If they continue on their original track, you can combine this with seguing to another topic.
I didn’t suggest this to you initially because it doesn’t sound like your natural style and I think advice is best if it allows the recipient to handle things mostly in their own way while helping to avoid pitfalls in doing so. I guess you’ll have to navigate this daily frustration in a way a little outside of your comfort zone by carefully appearing to engage whilst really not and hopefully they’ll find you so boring they don’t bother anymore. Hopefully you don’t mind this giving the impression that you’re a boring person to the remaining 50% of your peers that don’t bother you so much but sometimes it’s a necessary evil.