The Social Outcast

One thing about the work experience is that it tends to remove the social outcasts from their shell. In university, the social outcast character could just hide away all morning – and night – to do their own work. Teamwork usually meant different teams for projects at the end of which, the social outcast could say, “I’m sick of seeing this project and everything that reminds me of this project, including you, so don’t call again.”

However at work, you’ll be working in the same team, and you’ll be seeing the same people over and over again. From the computer screen backgrounds, you can tell who’s married (*hint*hint*: children’s picture), who’s still single (*hint*hint*:their own picture as a child), who’s getting married soon (*hint*hint*:A spreadsheet with TOTAL EXPENSES= ∞), who’s getting divorced soon, (*hint*hint*:

Courtesy of Google Images

With time, you also start to know the details of people’s lives, the number of children/wives, the names of these children/wives, in what schools these children study, not because you’re interested so much, but because there are a lot of mundane conversations taking place.

“Good morning.” Smile. “How are you?”

Inner voice: “Not that I care so much”

“I’m fine. I had to drop my kids at school, but you know there was traffic today on…”

*Tune out*

Mental note: Next time, don’t ask ‘how are you?’ when you’re not interested.

And this happens assuming you even understand the language of the people you work with. Some of our professors already spoke to us about the importance of adding new languages to our CV. At first, we used to think languages like Spanish and French were what made a CV stand out, until with time we discovered they were very impractical in the UAE, so the Spanish coursebooks had to be replaced by…

P.S. No offense intended to any racial/ethnic group