why i am insufferable

i’m leaving my cushy job for various reasons but the one most people would understand, the one i call to mind when i doubt myself, is the growing tension between myself and my fellow slave. Since we share a small office some disagreements are inevitable but her resentment and suspicion are now a daily poison in my life. She is naturally grumpy and bad-tempered but we’ve usually more or less got on, partly because i run her errands and buy her lunch every day (she has a bad knee so i volunteered), and partly because i am naturally conciliatory (not so much out of any goodness as out of a reluctance to lower myself to squabble). Her grumpiness was usually reserved for everyone else, e.g.:

Physiotherapist: Do you know our fax number?

FS: Yes, it’s 1234.

Physiotherapist departs.

FS: Stupid woman. Why’s she have to ask that? Of course I know our fax number. Stupid question.

Elberry smiles politely.

And so on. Of late her edge has been turned against me and there is real anger here, stored-up resentment. There doesn’t seem to have been any trigger. i think it’s rather that she resents my insouciant attitude, which i try to keep as tamped down as possible, but, as i say, we share a small office. Perhaps if i was bad at my job she wouldn’t mind so much; i think it galls her that i can not only keep up with the work but do it well, and yet don’t seem to take it seriously. She takes it seriously. She hits 65 this December and is not going to retire; she loves her job. To me, it’s mundane drudgery that employs about 1% of my brain and leaves the rest tormented with boredom; to her it’s a good, fulfilling job and should be taken seriously. It doesn’t matter that i do my job well: i should frown seriously while i do it, scowl with determination, perhaps pump my fist in the air after completing a letter.

On Friday, i realised i probably also confuse and hence infuriate my fellow slave. i have learnt, over my many jobs, to gear shift down in my dealings with regular people, so i don’t suddenly start referring to Kierkegaard or Cavalcante, but – especially over time – my way of speaking registers as a little odd, the words not quite as flat and prone as is normal. Even carefully filtering out literary high falutin talk the tone disturbs.

As Miss Dreamy put it:

Elberry the eccentric, the riddler and dissimulator who has all the irony of a condemned person walking to the gallows. Irony gives colour to thoughts and things in a way that not everyone understands. Indeed, you have a way with words, a somewhat reckless appreciation of the sardonic and the grotesque.

i remembered the suspicious looks my fellow slave often gives me when i make some harmless enough remark; it is the edge of irony, the penumbra of unspoken but nonetheless felt possibilities, which disturbs and offends. She must find me absolutely insufferable. i no doubt seem to be constantly making snide, weird remarks, which she can’t quite understand and can’t quite object to, but which nonetheless register as full of hidden meanings. i must, in short, seem to be one sarcastic evil-minded bastard.

She has a few times accused me of thinking i’m better than everyone else, thinking i’m smarter than everyone else, etc. Since i’ve never said anything of the sort, nor have i implied such (by, for example, saying other people are stupid or evil), it must be her attempt to decipher my habitual irony, that extra and to her inscrutable dimension. i must seem to her a sneering, over-educated sneak, making smart remarks that decent, ordinary folk can’t quite understand, thinking i’m better than everyone else, not taking the job seriously, etc., etc. It must be particularly galling that i never say anything she can grasp against me, it’s just that i’m not exactly like everyone else, and that’s enough to make her hate me.

i don’t hate her. i just feel profoundly weary of having to spend most of my waking life in her company. i’ve been here too long. The trick is to keep moving, never stay anywhere long enough to arouse the inevitably hatred, the mob coming up to the castle with their pitchforks and flaming torches and holy water, to exorcise this terrible abomination, the evil that is Elberry…